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I thought this forum was a skeptic free zone. I remember reading that way back when it was constructed. It is for people interested in "unexplained mysteries," not for debunkers to argue why there is "no such thing."
For those of us who have experienced paranormal "phenomenon" there is no doubt. Those who have not remain sceptical.
I never said there was no scientific explanation. I used the watch flipping on its own as an example of something that would be discussed on this forum.
You on the other hand are dismissing any and all things paranormal based on something you read which you cited in your OP.
It's like someone who waves his hand at all non-christian beliefs and says they are hogwash because <then cites one scripture>.
That isn't actually the case. Not at all. I am not a spring chicken. I've been around a while and have had many life experiences. I spent over 20 years in the field as a hydrogeologist, and have seen things that you wouldn't believe unless you saw them yourself, or unless you saw the supporting documentation. For instance, though it is a very well understood phenomenon, the first well I brought in that went artesian was truly something to see. If I had brought that well in in some location in Africa or India where they believe in witchcraft or sorcery, I might have been in thought of as a witch or at least, someone who possessed magical powers. But my scientific training has shown me very clearly that artesian wells are a perfectly understandable natural phenomenon with very well understood properties that can be predicted and accounted for. And so when I see people making paranormal claims I ask myself "where is the science"? And time and time again I don't see it. So no, it is not based on something I merely read about, but rather it is based on my training as a field scientist with many years of experience.
As for what you said, you said this:
"There are some events which cannot be explained by science. At this point. Until then those events are termed paranormal phenomenae for the purpose of this thread."
There is no sound scientific basis for concluding that something we don't understand should be regarded as paranormal until we can explain it. The default scientific position is not to come to ANY conclusion at all so as to keep all possibilities open. But it doesn't actually take very long to winnow out the unlikely explanations. And in scientific circles, paranormal phenomenon are actually the easiest to weed out because they are the least probable explanations. And this is where Occam's razor (which is also known as the is a principle of parsimony) comes in. It states that among competing hypotheses, the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions should be selected. So for instance, using our artesian well as an example, which is the simplest explanation, that I have magical powers to raise water out of the ground, or is this the explanation that makes the most sense?
Now, the latter explanation certainly doesn't appear to be the simplest on the face of it, but it is based on, and satisfies all the known laws of physics (the most important of which, in this case, are gravity and Darcy's law) and principles of geology, and is testable, predictable and repeatable. How does one test and predict, and repeat a magic power? How do magic powers satisfy what we know about the physical world? So in science, we look for the simplest explanation that satisfies the known laws of verifiable science, but no simpler.
Scientific answers are not easy to come by. It takes a lot of hard work. It is much easier to simply resort to magic or "paranormal" explanations. But our modern civilization would not exist if we simply refused to come out of the cave and agreed with the witch doctor that those flashes of light and booming sounds come from an angry god instead of the simple thunderstorm that modern science has shown us that it is.
Last edited by orogenicman; 11-06-2013 at 01:50 AM..
Location: Central Bay Area, CA as of Jan 2010...but still a proud Texan from Houston!
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Quote:
Originally Posted by orogenicman
According to Merriam-Webster, paranormal is defined as:
: very strange and not able to be explained by what scientists know about nature and the world
Did you ever stop to consider that scientists are limited by the sensitivity and specificity of their measuring devices?
There is a lot that can't be explained about our Universe. And much of what they think they know is only a hypothesis. We don't have the technology to go inside of a black hole and figure out what it is.
But often things that we may perceive as paranormal can't be replicated in experiments so science can't repeat it to study it.
Doesn't mean it isn't real, though.
And by the way, when you act so high and mighty, and want to be superior... you should use the right words. It's not "chock" it up, it's "CHALK".
If you are going to resort to correcting grammatical errors and typos, we aren't going to get very far in our discussion. As for what science can and cannot discover, never say never. Having said that, if science cannot replicate "paranormal phenomenon" (you'll have to give me an unambiguous example here), then it is a good bet that the phenomenon doesn't actually exist. Our senses are easily confused. Which is why modern science has constructed devices that not only go beyond our senses, but aren't so readily confused.
Anecdotes aren't science and they certainly don't constitute scientific proof. I would look at ghosts and hauntings as an example. Over the course of recorded human history, perhaps several million people have experienced what they might call a ghost or a haunting. Out of those people, a chunk of them are flat-out lying. Another chunk are clearly mistaken. And when I say clearly mistaken, I mean that you, me, or anyone else could observe what the witness observed and quickly figure its rather mundane origins ("It's a fox, or, it's your neighbor's furnace kicking on"). Another, smaller chunk of people are mentally ill or they can be doubted due to drug and/or alcohol use. But after all of that, there's still a large number of people who've experienced things that can't be easily explained and are not lying. Among those could be counted the famous and well-respected. Among the experiences are those shared by different people at the same location at different times and the people who had experiences at the later time were unaware of the previous experiences at the same location. Some of the experiences had more than a few witnesses. Anecdotal evidence is certainly not scientific evidence or a substitution for scientific evidence (I have't noticed anyone on this thread yet who has made that claim), but anecdotal evidence is evidence, and in the case of ghosts and hauntings, there is a great deal of it.
Let me repeat (hopefully for the last time), farmer Bob may be the most well respected, honest man anyone has ever known, but we still need unambiguous physical evidence that he saw ghosts in his outhouse. There is some neuroscience evidence to suggest that these experiences are in our head. The human brain is a complex organ, and many false perceptions can be triggered in it. Recent studies have shown that so-called out of body experiences are a result of
a brain glitch, instabilities in a part of the brain called the temporal lobe, and to errors in the body's sense of itself — even in healthy individuals.
The temporal lobe interprets the sensory and other information coming in from the body and places it on a body map, giving us our sense of being inside our body, of looking out from our eyes. If this interpretation goes wrong, a hallucination can occur in which a person sees themselves from outside of their body, also called an out-of-body experience (OBE).
I believe that further research will show that similar "glitches" in our brain functions can generate "ghost" experiences and other haunting phenomenon.
For those of us who have experienced paranormal "phenomenon" there is no doubt. Those who have not remain sceptical.
On the contrary, I suspect that many very skeptical scientists have also experienced things that they could not, at least on first glance, explain. When I was a teenager, I was listening to some rock music in my mother's basement with my twin brother. Suddenly a glass exploded on the table right in front of out eyes. It surprised the hell out of both of us, and neither could figure out why. My brother thought it was a ghost. The next morning, when I went down stairs I looked out our stereo and realized that we had the volume up much higher than either of us had realized. One of the speaker cabinets with the 12 inch woofer in it was located about 5 feet from that table. Now, I didn't bother to try to replicate it, but I went away convinced that it was our very loud music that caused the glass to explode. And to this day, I believe that that was and is a perfectly sound (no pun intended) explanation.
Did you ever stop to consider that scientists are limited by the sensitivity and specificity of their measuring devices?
Our measuring devices, in most cases, are orders of magnitude more sensitive than our own natural bodily senses, with a broader range than our own bodies can detect. Our bodies cannot detect ionizing radiation, for example. But we have devices that can detect ionizing radiation down to the parts per trillion. So I am not buying the notion that there is a measurement bias.
Quote:
There is a lot that can't be explained about our Universe. And much of what they think they know is only a hypothesis. We don't have the technology to go inside of a black hole and figure out what it is.
Scientists are the first to admit that there is a lot that we don't know. But it is also very surprising how much we DO know. They are also the first to tell you that the unexplained is not inexplicable, and that just because we have no current explanation for some phenomenon doesn't mean that we default to some supernatural explanation, because those types of explanations don't actually get us anywhere, don't actually mean anything. There is no shame in declaring "we don't know", but that is a far cry from simply waving our hands in the air and declaring it a "paranormal phenomenon". Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Why keep feeding this fire? We all have personal opinions, beliefs, and knowledge of what we can understand and believe to be true. At some point, all of this sound and fury becomes nothing (or boils down to semantics, and I paraphrase
Why keep feeding this fire? We all have personal opinions, beliefs, and knowledge of what we can understand and believe to be true. At some point, all of this sound and fury becomes nothing (or boils down to semantics, and I paraphrase
Because it is a part of the learning process. One cannot grow without "kindling the fire" of curiosity, and acting on it. Otherwise, how are we different from any other creature that crawls on this Earth? I may not be the brightest stick in the fire, but at least my stick burns in the first place.
I keep hearing about (presumably paranormal) events science "cannot explain". Which events are these? And is a scientific explanation the only reasonable one? What about logical explanations that are more reasonable than paranormal ones?
For instance, an explanation of why a dog would be barking into an empty corner likely having to do with an animal or insect in the wall is hardly a scientific explanation, yet it's more reasonable than the assumption that there is a disembodied spirit there.
In lieu of a scientific explanation, do we default to reasonable conjecture or to our most fantastical beliefs, simply because no one has proved otherwise?
Just curious how most people approach this.
Yes, a dog parking at what seems to be an empty corner could be an insect on the wall or an animal in the wall. That's why most ghost hunters go into a situation as a skeptic. The only way you can ever say something is unexplained or paranormal is to first eliminate any possibility that there could be a natural explanation. The person that sees a dog barking into an empty corner and immediately jumps to "ghost" is someone that just wants to believe there is a ghost and will refuse to hear any other arguments.
An example is a friend of mine who is rather naive. His brother moved into a condo and convinced him it was haunted. One day him and his brother went down into the crawlspace that was apparently accessed from the kitchen. A couple of his brother's friends stay up in the kitchen. Within moments, a pen fell into the crawlspace behind them. His brother's friends claimed they hadn't touched it so my friend immediately went to "It was a ghost!" Really?? Was he that dumb to think his brother and his friends weren't just playing a trick on him? Just because they told you they didn't do it, you still have to go with the possibility and likelihood that they did and you can't call it unexplainable or say it's a ghost.
I've experienced a lot of strange things, both in my house and in a place I used to work. And while I've never been able to explain some of them, I've always assumed that there is some explanation. Because that sound you heard from a room down the hall that you can't find the source for could still be many things. Just because you can't find the source doesn't mean it's a ghost. I'm very open minded and I do believe in the possibility of ghosts, but I've still never encountered anything to make me truly believe. Maybe someday but it won't be something I see on film or hear on a recording. It would have to be something I witness, either an actually apparition or, well, that may be about the only thing.
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