People who see the paranormal; mentally ill, hoaxters, or the 'placebo' effect?

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The alternative is to ban/outlaw 'all religions' or any talk of the 'unexplained/phenomena'. A couple of countries seem to going along these lines:

i) NK: The self-appointed Kim replaces any need for such beliefs. 'glorious leader' though whom everything and anything is possible. No other deity or belief should be entertained or needed. He still suffers from Gout in his big toe, surely an easy cure for those who are glorious.

ii) China: The rise in atheism and a growing middle-class 'controlled capitalist outlook' fulfills all needs. Anything else is generally frowned upon. Ancient traditional practices or beliefs may still exist, but will likely not become a favoured outlook by the future generations.

Cheerful Spring

Never seen a ghost, alien, creature i could not identify. I have seen unusual flying phenomenon. I guess this has made me more open to things like ghost aliens, and strange creatures can exist. People will say i am crazy and i never saw what i did, but i know otherwise. So if someone experienced and claims to have seen a ghost/or whatever i would not disbelieve till i found more about it. Lot people never experience anything, but they claim otherwise. It same as a person who cheat you out of money, why do cheat you, what is it about them, that they don't feel remorse for robbing you?

railer201

nozzferrahhtoo wrote: »

You know exactly what I think about it given you know you posted it before and I replied to it before. But I notice when quoting that post you A) did not quote all of it and did not include the usual link to the post so that people could see ALL of it.

But I am happy to repeat the parts you edited out! And even add to it a little.

We know stories like this happen all the time.

What I think people miss when parsing stories of this form is just how many people are on this planet. And just how many of them hear voices all the time.

So stories like the one you link to are almost a statistical necessity. They HAVE to happen. Why? Because SO MANY people are hearing voices in this world that eventually SOME of them have to coincide with a real world event.

A similar example is the people who claim things like "I was thinking about my friend, who I have not spoken to in 10 years..... and in THAT VERY MOMENT the friend phoned me!!!!!" as if some kind of psychic connection has occured.

And initially there is a kind of "wow" factor to a story like that until rationality takes over and you realize A) People think about friends and relatives all the time, sometime numerous times per day. People ring old friends all the time. c) Statistically there are going to be numerous cases where these two things coincide.

So in the case of your anecdote, people will think about, maybe even hallucinate, friends all the time. Friends die all the time. So statistically speaking you will HAVE to some days find some anecdotes of people who had such an experience followed by learning the person died.

Anecdotes of this nature require nothing paranormal. They just require basic, every day, normal, mundande, mathematical statistics.



It is nothing about doubting them so much as merely caring for their well being. If you want to explore the possibility of a paranormal event, that is FINE with me. But I think we owe it to people, who have started seeing and hearing things that are seemingly not there, to be prudent and take the medical course FIRST.

Seeing and hearing things that are not there is often symptomatic of what can be very serious and life threatening conditions. By all means explore as many explanations as you want to. But for the sake of the person in question explore the medical ones FIRST before any possible medical condition can progress further.



Not "the problem" at all no. "The Problem" is that people have all kinds of unexplained experiences all the time. Every day 100s of people will have experiences THEY can not explain. And it is often fun, interesting, useful, or all of the above to try and explain them.

What is NOT helpful is to simply transpose some pet narrative about existence onto such experience and act like the fact they can not be explained essentially means they can be explained. "Oh I cant explain that.... therefore god" "I can not explain that.... therefore ghosts" "I can not explain that.... therefore aliens".

The moment you find yourself using a LACK of explanation for something AS evidence for some narrative..... is the moment you have erred into wish thinking, confirmation bias, and narrative.

http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/12118487.Former_pilot_tells_of_ghostly_meeting_with_dead_colleague/


Never let it be said I engage in constructive editing and for other posters the discussion here is about the pilot who met up with the ghost of a fellow pilot at Glasgow Airport.


I'm glad you drew my attention to this post as it shows clearly the suggestions of hallucinations and 'often symptomatic of serious and threatening illness'.

Yet from your latest post you say the pilot wasn't hallucinating - so which is it ?

railer201

nozzferrahhtoo wrote: »

Perhaps YOU should check back and quote me because I do not need to check back for something I know personally is not there. You are the one who should be looking to find it, not me.

AGAIN my position is not that the pilot was hallucinating. My point is that in cases such as this this is the first thing to be checked. Nothing more.

Explore any explanation you like, but FIRST establish the medical well being of the individual.

Nice deft shift of position there - you don't have to look far - just to the post ^^^ above to see your suggestion of hallucination.

It is a conditioned response yes. Just not the one you pretend it to be. My conditioned response to things that COULD be indicative of illness......... is to discount illness before I consider anything else. That is pure medical prudence and nothing more. That you need to pretend otherwise is more telling than you realize.

There you go again - first choice illness. Sixth sense or paranormal experiences happen all the time to all sorts of sane and rational people - would a water diviner have to be medically checked over everytime his hazel twig detects water ?

Do keep up. I was making a GENERAL point about pilots in GENERAL, not about your specific anecdote. I have already dealt with your specific anecdote at length, which you mostly ignored and dodged while doing what you pretended was a "summing up" of my post.

"Summing up" in this case meaning selectively ignoring the bits you could not respond to. But I recommend anyone reading to go back to post #171 and read all the bits you did NOT put in bold (in other words, wantonly ignored).

Do keep up - says the poster who didn't reply for three weeks - less of the talk down to please - I have done my share of flying and experienced G-forces and never had any hallucinations as a result.

But that is not the statement I made. Why would I back up a statement I never made? That would be a very odd thing to do

I am happy to back up my positions and statements that I make myself. I am not so inclined to back up the ones you have made on my behalf.

If you see past the "quip" to the point you might find it more useful. The point being that the ability to make up a scenario, and declare it "possible" does nothing useful at all.

My lizard story might seem like a "quip" and a joke to you........ but so too does your explanations to me. The only difference is that mine was INTENDED to be unsubstantiated nonsense. Yours just IS unsubstantiated nonsense without your intention.

But there is no reason I should be any more open (or close) minded to your idea than you should be to mine. They both have equal substantiation (none) and they are both equally possible. Mine was intended to be comical, but that does not change the fact it IS possible. It IS possible that some weird lizard alien race beamed the hallucination into his head for kicks.


Did someone ask you to? I never once expressed any doubt that he had the vision he claims to have had. I suspect he probably did! It is the narrative that he/you apply after the fact that is the focus of my doubts. But I am happy to take it for granted, on good faith, that he saw what you claim he saw.


No. I am not. Speak for yourself. Some people are, but I am not one of them.

I genuinely wonder what it must feel like to be able to believe what you want to believe. I myself would like to believe Lisa Hannigan is in love with me for example.

But alas I can not believe what I "want" to believe. I am unable to believe the unsubstantiated. I am unable to NOT believe the substantiated. It does not matter how much I like the truth or hate the truth..... I have no personal control over belief in it.

You might, I am not going to doubt you. But that you can, certainly does not mean I can.

If you want to talk about credentials I am afraid I have no interest in it. If you want to tell me what these credentialed people said, and what evidence they can offer to back it up......... then I am all ears!!! I am agog.

I believe what is presented to me in the way of paranormal experiences, like the pilot whose outlook was changed because of the experience. At the end of the day everyone makes their own journey.

nozzferrahhtoo

railer201 wrote: »

'm glad you drew my attention to this post as it shows clearly the suggestions of hallucinations and 'often symptomatic of serious and threatening illness'. Yet from your latest post you say the pilot wasn't hallucinating - so which is it ?

Genuinely confusing to me how you are not getting the difference. I never said that the pilot was hallucinating. Anywhere.

I said that seeing things that are not there is "OFTEN" symptomatic of serious and threatening illness and there is good moral reason to explore that possibility first.

Is English not your first language, or do you genuinely not see the difference here?

If you go to a doctor with a lump and the doctor says "Ok lumps are OFTEN symptomatic of cancer.... so we should check that first" do you go home and tell people "The doctor says I have cancer!"???? Really????

The two are MASSIVELY different statements and unless you are doing it willfully I genuinely can not see how you have mistaken one for the other not once, but multiple times now. I genuinely suspect at this point you are contriving to feign misunderstanding when in fact you understand my point perfectly well. And I suspect you are doing so to cover the REST of that post which you have, thus far, ENTIRELY ignored and dodged.

railer201 wrote: »

Nice deft shift of position there - you don't have to look far just to my last post to see your suggestion of hallucination.

No shift at all no. I have said exactly the same thing as before. My position has remained entirely unchanged.

railer201 wrote: »

There you go again - first choice illness.

There you go again.... missing the point. The first choice is not illness. The first choice is to ELIMINATE illness and CONSIDER illness before considering anything else. For no other reason than the well being of the person in question.

The alternative is to not consider illness, and consider supernatural explanations, while someone who MAY genuinely be ill sits there with an undiagnosed and progressing illness.

In other words it is not about prioritizing explanations. It is about prioritizing which order you explore each possible explanation in. I am doing the latter, and you are intent on pretending I am doing the former.

railer201 wrote: »

Sixth sense or paranormal experiences happen all the time to all sorts of sane and rational people - would a water diviner have to be medically checked over everytime his hazel twig detects water ?

That is an entirely different thing. That is not a case of someone seeing images or hearing sounds that no one else can see or hear. There is nothing about a twig shaking that is a common symtom of an illness. So on what grounds would you want to check them medically? You are contriving to spew nonsense now for reasons known only to yourself.

However on the subject of water divination I have seen tests done on people who claim to be able to do it. In the tests when they were brought to places and told there was water the "twig" moved. When they were told there was no water it did not. If they were NOT told where the water was however their success rate was around the same as flipping a coin.... as in pure guess work. But interestingly when they were told there was or was not water there..... but they were lied to...... their "twig" acted on the lie every time.

Which suggests to me water divination is nothing more than guess work and even autonomic pulses on behalf of the "twig" bearer and nothing to do with ACTUALLY detecting water in any way. In this case it is not their medical status that needs to be tested....... its their claims. And their claims do not seem to stand up to scrutiny.

railer201 wrote: »

Do keep up - says the poster who didn't reply for three weeks

And yet after three weeks I was able to keep up with the conversation and remember who said what, and what the context of each point was. There is a world of difference between a genuine absence, and an inability to follow or remember the conversation.

But as I said you have taken a GENERAL point I have made and pretended to rebut it by pretending it was about one SPECIFIC case. That is not an honest move by you, whether you erroneously feel "talked down to" or not.

railer201 wrote: »

I have done my share of flying and experienced G-forces and never had any hallucinations as a result.

And? Nowhere did I claim EVERYONE subjected to such things experience hallucinations. Once again you seem to read my point, then respond to another point I have never made. Why you feel the need to do that so often is anyone's guess.

The simply fact is that G-forces, and atmospheric pressure changes, and centrifuge force and many other such things are used to try to illicit varying effects from the brain of the subject. It works on some. It does not work on everyone.

railer201 wrote: »

I believe what is presented to me in the way of paranormal experiences, like the pilot whose outlook was changed because of the experience. At the end of the day everyone makes their own journey.

That someone's outlook was changed by an experience is not substantiation for the narrative that you or they put on that experience however. Many experiences are transformative in this world for the people who have them. But that they were transformed by it in NO WAY supports whatever explanation they simply make up for those experiences.

If someone said they had a vision of their best friend the night before he died......... or that they felt an all loving presence.......... or they heard a voice telling them the lotto numbers and those numbers came up............ or they saw some object in their house move all by itself............ I generally am willing to believe them. I do not doubt their experience.

Where my skepticism comes into play is on the explanations they offer for those experiences. I believe the object moved. Without substantiation I do not believe a ghost was moving it. I believe they had a vision of their friend who then subsequently died. I do not believe this is because some paranormal or supernatural event occurred.

You really need to stop conflating the two. The event, and the explanation for the event, are two distinct things.

railer201

nozzferrahhtoo wrote: »

Genuinely confusing to me how you are not getting the difference. I never said that the pilot was hallucinating. Anywhere.

I said that seeing things that are not there is "OFTEN" symptomatic of serious and threatening illness and there is good moral reason to explore that possibility first.

Is English not your first language, or do you genuinely not see the difference here?

If you go to a doctor with a lump and the doctor says "Ok lumps are OFTEN symptomatic of cancer.... so we should check that first" do you go home and tell people "The doctor says I have cancer!"???? Really????

The two are MASSIVELY different statements and unless you are doing it willfully I genuinely can not see how you have mistaken one for the other not once, but multiple times now. I genuinely suspect at this point you are contriving to feign misunderstanding when in fact you understand my point perfectly well. And I suspect you are doing so to cover the REST of that post which you have, thus far, ENTIRELY ignored and dodged.



No shift at all no. I have said exactly the same thing as before. My position has remained entirely unchanged.



There you go again.... missing the point. The first choice is not illness. The first choice is to ELIMINATE illness and CONSIDER illness before considering anything else. For no other reason than the well being of the person in question.

The alternative is to not consider illness, and consider supernatural explanations, while someone who MAY genuinely be ill sits there with an undiagnosed and progressing illness.

In other words it is not about prioritizing explanations. It is about prioritizing which order you explore each possible explanation in. I am doing the latter, and you are intent on pretending I am doing the former.



That is an entirely different thing. That is not a case of someone seeing images or hearing sounds that no one else can see or hear. There is nothing about a twig shaking that is a common symtom of an illness. So on what grounds would you want to check them medically? You are contriving to spew nonsense now for reasons known only to yourself.

However on the subject of water divination I have seen tests done on people who claim to be able to do it. In the tests when they were brought to places and told there was water the "twig" moved. When they were told there was no water it did not. If they were NOT told where the water was however their success rate was around the same as flipping a coin.... as in pure guess work. But interestingly when they were told there was or was not water there..... but they were lied to...... their "twig" acted on the lie every time.

Which suggests to me water divination is nothing more than guess work and even autonomic pulses on behalf of the "twig" bearer and nothing to do with ACTUALLY detecting water in any way. In this case it is not their medical status that needs to be tested....... its their claims. And their claims do not seem to stand up to scrutiny.



And yet after three weeks I was able to keep up with the conversation and remember who said what, and what the context of each point was. There is a world of difference between a genuine absence, and an inability to follow or remember the conversation.

But as I said you have taken a GENERAL point I have made and pretended to rebut it by pretending it was about one SPECIFIC case. That is not an honest move by you, whether you erroneously feel "talked down to" or not.



And? Nowhere did I claim EVERYONE subjected to such things experience hallucinations. Once again you seem to read my point, then respond to another point I have never made. Why you feel the need to do that so often is anyone's guess.

The simply fact is that G-forces, and atmospheric pressure changes, and centrifuge force and many other such things are used to try to illicit varying effects from the brain of the subject. It works on some. It does not work on everyone.



That someone's outlook was changed by an experience is not substantiation for the narrative that you or they put on that experience however. Many experiences are transformative in this world for the people who have them. But that they were transformed by it in NO WAY supports whatever explanation they simply make up for those experiences.

If someone said they had a vision of their best friend the night before he died......... or that they felt an all loving presence.......... or they heard a voice telling them the lotto numbers and those numbers came up............ or they saw some object in their house move all by itself............ I generally am willing to believe them. I do not doubt their experience.

Where my skepticism comes into play is on the explanations they offer for those experiences. I believe the object moved. Without substantiation I do not believe a ghost was moving it. I believe they had a vision of their friend who then subsequently died. I do not believe this is because some paranormal or supernatural event occurred.

You really need to stop conflating the two. The event, and the explanation for the event, are two distinct things.

Neither did I say you said the pilot was hallucinating. I said you suggested it. So less of the smart remarks about the English language if you don't mind.

I understand your point alright as the suggestion enables you to cleverly hold two views on the subject - the pilot is possibly hallucinating, but not necessarily hallucinating. Which is why I went for a summary just to try and pin you down, but I see now that's not possible or acceptable to you.

TBH I've more to do with my time than debate with a closed mind on the paranormal. You argue against every aspect - NDE's - Apparitions - Divining
etc., and simultaneously engage in a highly detailed, long winded, nuanced but shifty style of debating, which is quite time consuming and wearying tbh.

So good luck to you - there is no meeting of minds here.

nozzferrahhtoo

railer201 wrote: »

Neither did I say you said the pilot was hallucinating.

railer201 wrote: »

To sum up then you are saying that the pilot was hallucinating

Why lie about your own words now???

railer201 wrote: »

So less of the smart remarks about the English language if you don't mind.

I made no such remarks. I asked a genuine question, the answer to which would be useful to me in deciding how to frames my posts going forward. Not every question is an affront or an attack you know. Given you have taken a simple statement X as having a completely different meaning Y, multiple times, it is a genuine and useful question for me to have asked.

railer201 wrote: »

I understand your point alright as the suggestion enables you to cleverly hold two views on the subject - the pilot is possibly hallucinating, but not necessarily hallucinating.

Well yes. Until we know the explanation for any such event.... it is indeed the CORRECT thing to do to keep all options open, including that of hallucination.

You seem bothered that the mere suggestion of that as a possibility is on the table. Yet there is absolutely no reason it should not be.

We know for a fact that seeing, hearing, or feeling things that are not there is OFTEN a symptom of underlying medical conditions.

So that explanation needs to be explored and.... for the well being of any given person..... should be the FIRST thing we explore.

railer201 wrote: »

TBH I've more to do with my time than debate with a closed mind on the paranormal. You argue against every aspect - NDE's - Apparitions - Divining etc., and simultaneously engage in a highly detailed, long winded, nuanced but shifty style of debating, which is quite time consuming and wearying tbh.

How you invest your time is not my concern, as to my knowledge no one is forcing you to communicate with me.

But that you do not want to engage does not mean there is anything "shifty" about me. What IS shifty is your ignoring my points about this topic and instead making a multi-post attack on me personally. You attack the poster not the post which is shifty. You also take large posts and focus on one single sentence in it while ignoring and dodging the rest. That is also shifty. I do not just call your approach shifty and run away, I explain exactly WHAT is shifty and WHY. You on the other hand merely throw out the word "shifty" without any substance or clarification. Some different doncha think?

There is nothing close minded about not accepting explanations that are unsubstantiated. Open mindedness is ONLY about being willing to accept a claim if it is well evidenced. Open mindedness is NOT about automatically lending credence to any claim that comes along.

If you require any further information on what open and close mindedness actually means, rather than what you appear to think it means, I can heartily recommend this video here.

In the meantime however I have dealt with your single anecdote, and you have ignored the substance of that. So I can happily repeat it here in bullet format:

• You have offered a case where a person claims to have seen a vision of an acquaintance before that acquaintance a short time later died.
• I have suggested there is nothing remarkable about this.
• The reasoning for that response is simple to understand.
• People claim to see and hear such visions and apparitions frequently. (X)
• People die frequently. (Y)
• Mere statistics suggests that therefore X and Y will, with some level of frequency, coincide.
• You are offering nothing more than a SINGLE anecdote of such an overlap.
• Therefore I see nothing remarkable about your anecdote, and nothing that requires a supernatural explanation.

Now have you a response to that point, or is calling it "shifty" before running away the sum total of the response you can muster to it?

railer201

nozzferrahhtoo wrote: »

..........................................................
In the meantime however I have dealt with your single anecdote, and you have ignored the substance of that. So I can happily repeat it here in bullet format:

• You have offered a case where a person claims to have seen a vision of an acquaintance before that acquaintance a short time later died.
• I have suggested there is nothing remarkable about this.
• The reasoning for that response is simple to understand.
• People claim to see and hear such visions and apparitions frequently. (X)
• People die frequently. (Y)
• Mere statistics suggests that therefore X and Y will, with some level of frequency, coincide.
• You are offering nothing more than a SINGLE anecdote of such an overlap.
• Therefore I see nothing remarkable about your anecdote, and nothing that requires a supernatural explanation.

Now have you a response to that point, or is calling it "shifty" before running away the sum total of the response you can muster to it?

Captain Bob Hambleton-Jones said yesterday that he had no idea that Robert Macleod, a friend and fellow pilot with Loganair, had died in an Edinburgh hospital four days earlier.

You haven't even bothered reading the initial account properly - the pilot died four days before the apparition. That does indeed make it remarkable, in that it opens up the possibility of human consciousness surviving in spirit form after death. Did the pilot actually meet the spirit of his dead colleague ?

As for the rest I will not be responding further.

(Some re-shuffling taking place in the post below, I see - no surprises there and btw Nozzferrahtoo - you know full well what my point is !)

nozzferrahhtoo

railer201 wrote: »

the pilot died four days before the apparition. That does indeed make it remarkable.

A minor detail that I did mis-remember but it does not affect what I wrote AT ALL so I am not sure what your point is. Nor am I convinced even you know what your point is.

But I am happy to include this minor correction (in bold) in my list rather than have you use it as an out to dodge the main point within it:

• You have offered a case where a person claims to have seen a vision of an acquaintance shortly after that acquaintance died.
• I have suggested there is nothing remarkable about this.
• The reasoning for that response is simple to understand.
• People claim to see and hear such visions and apparitions frequently. (X)
• People die frequently. (Y)
• Mere statistics suggests that therefore X and Y will, with some level of frequency, coincide.
• You are offering nothing more than a SINGLE anecdote of such an overlap.
• Therefore I see nothing remarkable about your anecdote, and nothing that requires a supernatural explanation.

What I also find interesting is that the article you linked to told us when the person died (June 11th if my memory serves) and when he was shown the obituary (June 16th was it?), but it does not mention what date the news paper with the obituary actually was. was it the 16th? The 15th? The 12th? It is perfectly possible that this Captain Bob read that obituary and that news paper and it simply did not register with him. When people claim things like "I definitely did not know!" I think it prudent to be open to the possibility of them actually knowing on some level.

nozzferrahhtoo

Declaring things to be not true or a lie is a very easy thing to do. Actually showing them to be is another thing altogether. So let us see how well you managed to achieve that goal..............

....... so so far you are agreeing with me entirely. Because if you read back you will find I already said that. So you start out by declaring my post not to be true, but then you go on to AGREE with it. That is a weird move.

Yes, our knowledge of consciousness is incomplete. Or "laden with holes" to use your phrase. I already said that.

But what I ALSO said is that 100% of the knowledge we currently DO have links consciousness to the brain. 0% of the knowledge we currently have shows any potential disconnect between the two. Much less the survival of one following the death of the other.

Does that mean it is not possible? Hell no! It just means the idea of an after life AT THIS TIME is not supported by any evidence, and what evidence we do have goes against it.

That ignorance and mysteries exist around human consciousness is a given and I have not suggested otherwise. But ignorance and mysteries are NOT evidence for any explanation you simply make up and WANT to be true.

And all your post does is list the facts I have ALREADY ACKNOWLEDGED which is that we still have a LOT to learn about consciousness and how it works.

So really I am not seeing what you find to be "untrue" or "a lie" in my post, and you certainly have not shown it here. But perhaps you might make a second attempt.

_Brian

I am skeptical about paranormal stuff but constantly remind myself that what we take as fact is only the conclusions drawn from all CURRENT known facts.

There was a time when people drew the conclusion that the Earth was flat.

Equally there was a time when people drew the conclusion that thenearth was the centre of the solar system if not the whole galaxy.

With further more advanced reasoning and investigatory tools we can expand our current known facts on any topic and so change our conclusions.

Wibbs

_Brian wrote: »

I am skeptical about paranormal stuff but constantly remind myself that what we take as fact is only the conclusions drawn from all CURRENT known facts.

This pretty much. All we can be sure of is that much of what we know as fact is inaccurate, out of date, or plain wrong and that we will almost certainly draw new and different conclusions in the future.

nozzferrahhtoo

Indeed that is true. We can really only base our current conclusions on current evidence. Not the mistakes of the past, or what we imagine (and in some peoples cases hope) the evidence in the future will be.

It pays to be aware of that, but it also pays not to use that as an excuse to lend credence to any pet fantasy of choice. I fear a lot of people DO do that. They want X to be true so they support it with nothing but a "Well the data set, and hence our beliefs, will be different in the future".

I am sure that is true, but that does not mean THEIR particular belief of choice will be any more valid then than now.