The post for discussing Psychics, Ghosts & Paranormal BS

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Posted: Wed Jul 11, 2007 10:52 pm

Ghost wrote:

I’m going to put the toilet seat up…women hate that for some reason.

Can you say "banned"? Laughing

Posted: Wed Jul 11, 2007 11:22 pm

Don wrote:

On a related note: Is the light in my fridge really out when I close the door?

Why not put a video camera in the fridge?

Posted: Wed Jul 11, 2007 11:34 pm

^^ Sometimes if your fridge door is ever so slightly open you can see the light's gone off. A bit like car doors that press a button when they shut.

** ACCOUNT CLOSED ** Joined: 15 Apr 2007 Posts: 766

@Eliza:

Here you go!

A tune you can dance to!!!

--J.D.

P.S. Curiously, the "Official Salem Witch"--Lauri Cabot--yearly "bless'd" the Glorious Red Sox and, every year they would fail.

Bucky #@#$%!! Dent? Happened despite her blessings.
Bob @#$$%!!! Stanley, the REAL goat of '86? Happened despite her blessings.
Even Aaron @#$%!! Boone. . . .

So, one year, she decided it was hopeless. She did not bless the Glorious Red Sox.

The year was 2004.

--J. "'nuff Said" D.

Posted: Thu Jul 12, 2007 2:26 am

well, my wife goes to see a psychic and so far it's ok. Despite my skepticism she is a regular. Of course as most of the 'predictions' are of the " Give positive energy to the universe and the universe will give positive energy back" sort I let it slide.

Of course it's also cheaper than a shrink. . . . . Rolling Eyes

PS Glad to be back after being tied up with RL issues!

Posted: Thu Jul 12, 2007 3:03 am

You use a thermos to keep it hot.
You use a thermos to keep it cold.
But how do it know? Confused

Well, I put a cup of coffee and a popcycle in it (it was not purty.) Laughing

Posted: Thu Jul 12, 2007 6:52 am

... damn I thought the subject line said physics and the paranormal. Laughing

Anyway back on topic, I do happen to believe in a paranormal world to some extent. When I was young I used to have a lot of meaningless dreams. When I grew into my teenage years the amount of dreams began to tone down to very few until I was lucky to dream once every few months. However as I started dreaming less and less my dreams turned into deja vu type situations. Call me nuts or whatever, but when I dream now (which I get lucky to dream once a year)... I pay attention to it and write it in a diary because for some odd reason there are parts of my dreams these days that happen in real life circumstances that are totally beyond my control. I don't know how to explain it, I just accept it. The last time it happened to me it was with a conversation I didn't initiate... yet it all went the same way in life as it did in my dream no matter how hard I tried to steer away from and manipulate the whole conversation.

Anyway please don't burn me at the stake as a wizard or something. Laughing

Posted: Thu Jul 12, 2007 7:02 am

On the subject of paranormal, I haven't seen a ghost, but I smelled one once! Shocked

Back in the late 1970s when I still had my own hair and teeth, I used to work in my local pub which is probably over 300 years old.

One morning I was stocking up behind the bar and suddenly got this strong smell of cocoa. I was the only one in the bar and the smell was overwhelming. I later went upstairs, where the owners lived and mentioned it to them. None of them drank cocoa. The landlady told me it was just the ghost who they had nicknamed 'Cocoa' Shocked

I also used to have really uncomfortable feelings when I used to have to change barrels in the cellar and couldn't get out of there quick enough. I still go in the pub though.

Posted: Thu Jul 12, 2007 7:24 am

If anyone is interested in learning more about the subtle art of Mentalism, I can recommend this book 13 Steps to Mentalism
I do some magic as a hobby, and although I haven't read this particular book yet it's regarded as the bible of this discipline. Wink

Posted: Thu Jul 12, 2007 7:42 am

yrubraj wrote:

^^ Sometimes if your fridge door is ever so slightly open you can see the light's gone off. A bit like car doors that press a button when they shut.

But what if it turns it on again once I completely close it?

FiveForces wrote:

Why not put a video camera in the fridge?

Maybe it will only turn the light off if there's a video camera in it?

Anyway, you see what I'm getting at. Wink

It's all a matter of belief. Paul Auster (the chap I once happened to write my thesis about) wrote more than a dozen novels on the topic of chance and how we humans tend to create a meaning to combine two or more completely unrelated events.

Quote:

Like everyone else, he craves a meaning. Like everyone else, his life is so fragmented that each time he sees a connection between two fragments he is tempted to look for a meaning in that connection. The connection exists. But to give it a meaning, to look beyond the bare fact of its existence, would be to build an imaginary world inside the real world, and he knows it would not stand. At his bravest moments, he embraces meaninglessness as the first principle, and then he understands that his obligation is to see what is in front of him (even though it is also inside him) and to say what he sees.

And then, as has been noted before, our memory will make "extraordinary" events weigh more. It's how our brain works - we won't notice a brick falling very far from our head, we won't be able to think about a brick falling directly on our head, we can only wonder about a brick nearly hitting us!

A RL example of what happened to me Sunday night and would have had me believe in divine intervention if I wasn't such a godless bloody cynic: I sat down for dinner with a friend on the terrace of my local restaurant. Talks between males in Italy will revolve around football and women so we talked about the football world championship, Juventus Turin and related matters. Talking about football it sprung to my mind that I hadn't seen a certain girl I happened to fancy 2 years ago for a whole year. It was a memory that struck me because I happened to see her regularly at that place and only now noticed her absence.

About 10 minutes later a small crowd entered the terrace and sure enough there was she...which indeed left the two of us somewhat befuddled. Were the signs trying to tell me something? Do I have the magic power to summon up people! Well, yes, but only if you "want to believe"!

1) I hadn't frequented that place myself that often in the past year, thusly lowering the probabilities of seeing her.
2) Given the circumstances (eating at that place, being with an Italian male) it was quite predictable that we should end up mentioning her.
3) In the most likely event of her NOT showing up that night I wouldn't have noticed anything worth mentioning. We talk about people who don't then magically show up all the time so we don't get all excited about that fact (just like we don't discuss the fact that we DIDN'T get hit on the head by a brick on our way home).

In other words we're talking about something the French philosopher Henry Bergson called "the retrograde movement of the true":

Quote:

To every true affirmation we attribute thus a retroactive effect; or rather, we impart to it a retrograde movement. As though a judgment could have pre-existed the terms which make it up! As though these terms did not date from the appearance of the objects they repre�sent! As though the thing and the idea of the thing, its reality and its possibility, were not created at one stroke when a truly new form, invented by art or nature is con�cerned !

The consequences of this illusion are innumerable. 2 Our estimate of men and events is wholly impregnated with a belief in the retrospective value of true judgment, in, a retrograde movement which truth, once posited, would automatically make in time. By the sole fact of be�ing accomplished, reality casts its shadow behind it into the indefinitely distant past: it thus seems to have been pre-existent to its own realization, in the form of a pos�sible. From this results. an error which vitiates our con�ception of the past; from this arises our daim to antici�pate the future on every occasion. We ask ourselves, for example, what the art, the literature, the civilization of tomorrow will be like; we picture approximately the graph of the evolution of societies; we go so far as to predict events in detail.

So what we usually perceive as "prediction" is but an evaluation of the past. Just that we don't talk about predictions that didn't become true, because that's normality. Wink

That was a long post with complicated words in it so here's a picture of a dog for Reaper:

Posted: Thu Jul 12, 2007 7:51 am

Your absolutely right Don, I have that happen to me too, When it cames to pass you prick your ears up a bit. Most of the time nothing happens when you think about or talk about someone you haven't seen in ages, so it doesn't register in that way.

So, You asked her for her number right? Wink

Posted: Thu Jul 12, 2007 7:53 am

windypops wrote:

So, You asked her for her number right? Wink

C'mon, that was too easy to count as a prediction. Laughing

Posted: Thu Jul 12, 2007 7:54 am

Blast! that's another one of my predictions up the swanee Laughing

Posted: Thu Jul 12, 2007 8:20 am

I seem to feel a lot of deja vu's, supposedly people between the age of 15-25 experience them the most.

Some people deja vu's occurs because an original experience was neither fully attended to nor properly put in memory. If so, then it would seem most likely that the present situation triggers the recollection of a fragment memory from the past.

The experience may seem uncanny if the memory is so fragmented that no strong connections can be made between the fragment memory and other
memories.

Thus, the feeling that you have been there before is often due to the fact that you have been there before. You've just forgotten most of the original experience because you haven't been paying close attention the first time.

@Don, I prefer German Shepherds

Posted: Thu Jul 12, 2007 8:29 am

Cite your sources, reaper! Especially if you use complicated words and proper spelling and such. http://skepdic.com/dejavu.html

Laughing

Posted: Thu Jul 12, 2007 8:34 am

I knew you'd find it, the theory there is also my theory as well.

In my school if you change some of the words to your own its all ok, sorry Don here it is:

Bibliography

"The skeptics Dictionary"
Address: http://skepdic.com/dejavu.html
Accessed: 12, July, 2007
Author: Robert Todd Carroll

Posted: Thu Jul 12, 2007 8:39 am

Very good! Don't make me order you to write a hand-written 1000-words-essay on the subject! Wink

Posted: Thu Jul 12, 2007 8:44 am

I was always under the impression that a coincidence is two or more random
events that possess some commonality. If no one recognises the commonality is it still a coincidence or just random events?

Posted: Thu Jul 12, 2007 8:47 am

Any commonality will by definition only be percepted or construed by a human being, that is "applied to those events".

Posted: Thu Jul 12, 2007 11:01 am

Bobo419 wrote:

There is no god, no afterlife, no mysterious powers, no EPS, no telepathy; telekinesis, Bermuda Triangle, UFO's etc... If you believe that, you might as well believe Mr Mugu...

Funny thing is I do believe in UFOs. Whatever object you can't explain in the sky is a UFO. Somethings people see flying around just can't be explained as clouds, weather balloons and such. Yet they can be explained as very secret US or Russian military projects.

In the 60's & 70's people were seeing cigar shaped UFO's. The U2 & SR71 were declassified and nobody sees the cigar UFO's anymore. There was a documentary on Channel 5 called the Truth About UFOs. In that it charted the development of flying disks in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union and the States. It interviewed scientists who worked on propulsion systems for flying disks. It showed some footage of UFOs from Florida and the scientist explained how the propulsion system he had worked on in his career was working in the disks.

Quote:

My wife and her parents were scared by a low flying very fast UFO one night in South Yorkshire over 20 years ago. Last year I had my wife carefully draw what she saw then I loaded up google... what she saw was an F-117 stealth fighter years before the US admitted they existed. I suspect most of the 'credible' UFO sightings are new, top secret military aircraft.
Peter, Nottingham

From http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/6268708.stm

On ghosts, I think that something is happening but buggered if I know what it is. My grandmother died in her home. My grandfather never moved from that house. I always felt like there was someone watching and I never felt comfortable there in the house. I ALWAYS felt extremely uncomfortable in the bathroom toilet. My mother and brother were there visiting when my brother was a toddler. My mother was in the kitchen making food, and could hear my brother chatting away to himself. When he came down my mother asked who was he chatting to. He replied a 'nice lady'. He identified my dead grandmother from a photo. She had died before he was born. Two other elderly people had died at home in the house.

What was going on there? I do not know. I do NOT believe in the paranormal. I do not believe in life after death, I do not believe in ESP, telekinesis or matters like that. How do I explain my older brother talking to my grandmother when he was a toddler. I do not know. There is something wierd going on, but buggered if I can explain it.

Posted: Thu Jul 12, 2007 11:13 am

some of us stay behind for different reasons waiting usually for others -i think their timelines and time concepts are very different then ours

Posted: Thu Jul 12, 2007 11:58 am

A few hundred years ago nobody would have believed in electricity, radio waves, the internal combustion engine, computers or anaesthetics. I am sure that most of the phenomena we currently ascribe to the 'supernatural' are actually completely 'natural' - we just don't understand them yet. We currently define our perceptions with 4 dimensions. Who's to say there aren't 4000 dimensions into which a few people have brief insights - so-called psychic experiences - but it's all perfectly explainable once we have identified exactly what it is.

Posted: Thu Jul 12, 2007 12:05 pm

yes-we cant explain but someday we will know what happens after death-i think we are wired to not want to know -if we really found out what happens after death this world and its inhabitants views would change beyond anything we could imagine

** ACCOUNT CLOSED ** Joined: 15 Apr 2007 Posts: 766

You can demonstrated the effects of subatomic particles.

But the best a psychic can do is give a generic response?

Show me an effect and I will be interested in exploring its cause.

--J.D.

Posted: Thu Jul 12, 2007 12:17 pm

My thermos! Confused

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