Do you believe in the paranormal?
| Votes | Answer |
|---|
| 17 | Yes I do believe in the paranormal | | 14 | No I do not believe in the paranormal | | 6 | Other | | 4 | Something to say |
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| User | Comment |
|---|
cloudhugger   |
Deja Vue, I believe in that. | | cloudhugger |
Deja Vue, I believe in that.. | | cloudhugger |
Deja Vue, I believe in that... | Melf   |
Hell no. | | Melf |
| | Melf |
| | moonstone |
For the most part, yes. | Irene007  |
I'm still out on all of it until I get real proof but I do keep my mind opened.... | | Irene007 |
Ooooooh.... This place gives me the creeps! | | bill |
generally, no... but I try to be open-minded about it, a little too | | Enheduanna | | posted 1-Aug-2007 11:52am |
No. | | Amanda | | posted 1-Aug-2007 12:31pm |
The jury is still out. | | thecomic22 |
Yea to an extent. | | Galomorro |
Sorta. Some things I tend to believe more than others. It all depends on the particular paranormal thing but I'd say I DO more than I don't. Ghosts, yes; near death experience yes; reincarnation, yes -- other things more skeptical. | gambler   |
Not sure | | RGirl | | posted 1-Aug-2007 10:59pm |
I have changed my opinion back and forth all through my life. I explain that things have happened that I have no explanation for but a part of my brain is too logical to accept completely. | | Enigma |
> Deja Vu, I believe in that...
Now where have I heard this before? | | cloudhugger | | (reply to Enigma) posted 2-Aug-2007 12:19am |
In the paranormal part of your brain that sets well inside your ear. that's where you hear all those little voices inside your head. | | qdawg_07 |
go to the bio channel and youll see 1 time i talked to a ghost i said "if u r here turn the lights off for 30 mins and the lights turned off to make sure that it wusnt a power outage we looked next door and all there lights were on all the light bulbs were good in 30 mins wen they turned on none of the circuts were blown either that night wen we went to sleep i had a dream of a person killing his wife and 5 kids then hung him self so i woke everyone up and every1 had the same dream so we decided for 1 of us (me) to sleep and ask the person wut to do for him to leev he told me get all the bodies out of the house i said ok then he pulled out a knife and slashed my shoulder and wen i woke up i had a scar on my shoulder that wus bleeding and we found the bodies called the cops and wen the cops took all the bodies out of the house there wus a gaint blue bright light that appered so we thought that the ghost wus gone and it wus | | mrmarm |
Not particularly.  | | mrmarm |
Gee that's looks familiar for somewhere else, I guess it's true then.  | | cloudhugger |
That's what someone else said....was it you!? | | mrmarm |
A case of Déjà vu? | LindaH  | | posted 2-Aug-2007 10:02pm |
Not at all. Pffftt..... spooks | | cloudhugger | | posted 2-Aug-2007 10:07pm |
 I believe!! | | mrmarm |
Well you've convinced me. | | smurf |
Depends what you mean by 'paranormal' I guess. I don't believe in life on other planets, UFOs, ghosts (in the common "this house is haunted" sense) and stuff. But I do believe in God, and miracles, etc. Which means I also believe that Satan is real, demons are real, and there is a spiritual war being fought constantly in and around people. I also believe that some people have 'near death' experiences. | | Biggles |
UFOs aren't paranormal, they are simply objects that are flying that the observer is unable to identify. Near death experiences aren't paranormal - they are a well-known medical occurrence. There is no good evidence that ghosts exist.
No, I do not believe in the paranormal. | | Wicksy | | posted 15-Aug-2007 4:18pm |
I believe the world we know isn't reality. So what is paranormal?? | | Iseult | | posted 31-Aug-2007 4:39pm |
How is having near death experience paranormal? A lot of people has them, it's perfectly normal. | | moviesnob | | posted 10-Sep-2007 4:03pm |
I do believe in some paranormal things. I believe there is other life out there. | | Kristal_Rose | | posted 23-Oct-2007 8:03am |
I've experienced about half the phenomenon in the encyclopedia of the paranormal, so yeah. | | Kristal_Rose | | (reply to Biggles) posted 23-Oct-2007 9:21am |
How could there be good evidence that ghosts exist? They don't live on the physical plane. Some people can perceive them, others can't.
I can imagine robot visitors from another planet claiming there is no good evidence that emotions exist.
Come to think of it, there are a great many people who don't believe animals have consciousness.
The closest you could get to evidence is confession under torture or truth serum that a person actually believes they saw a ghost.
Not sure what you mean by near-death experiences, but they too are a perceived thing. The most you could get is a concensus on perceived events, and who's to say the things perceived even require being consistent to be valid? There may be a 100 different afterlives to choose from.
I agree with you on UFO's, even if they were from other stars, unless one defines paranormal as anything out of the ordinary. Heck, Bush is almost paranormal.
What I am getting at here is that by evidence, you mean 'scientific evidence', which is limited to the realm of cause and effect physical reality. There can be no proof of anything that lies ouside of the realm of cause and effect physical reality entirely from within the realm of cause and effect physical reality.
The most outstanding example of this is consciousness. People often confuse 'artificial intelligence' with machine consciousness. They are totally unrelated, just as their counterparts are within the human mind. One can have consciousness without sensory input or even thoughts in the form of words, pictures, feelings, or other physical sense cognates. For all we know, handheld calculators are already conscious, meditating on the input they receive from keystrokes.
There are cases where realms overlap. One might scientifically scan facial expressions and dendryte activity and infer the existence of a system like emotions, but never have a handle on what they actually are. Emotions belong to what one could call a separate dimension, although their impact can be seen on the physical plane. Spiritual plane activity is even more so like this. Worldly events may have spiritual causes, but this can only be inferred in the physical plane; Only from within the spiritual plane can one comprehend the spiritual plane.
If you were to solely restrict yourself to the physical plane, you would have to dismiss the existence and value of consciousness, amongst other things.
Of course when it comes down to it, we have no evidence of anything. Aside from the existentialism take on experience, 15 billion years of gravity could be a momentary chaotic fluke within the scope of eternity. Context is everything.
Of course the only context we can lay a solid claim to is our perception of this moment. We can't prove that an hour ago existed in anything but our memory. And again, we can't even prove that physical reality exists this instant either, because of the realm thing. We operate in the realm of perception and infer that there is a realm of physical reality which corresponds to our realm of perception. Then from there we infer the existence of consciousness, perception, emotion, &/or spiritual activity having an effect on the physical reality we perceive. It's very easy to be limited to projecting one's own perceptions on that inferred to underly that which we perceive. For instance a person who thinks visually or in words is likely to conclude that other humans do likewise. It generally takes a taste of direct experience in a realm for one to even be aware of it's existence around them. One for instance might live their life oblivious of certain emotions until they've eventually experienced it themselves, upon which they see it's motivating influence all around them. Economics, politics, philanthropy, people generally tune out cues of entire systems affecting their reality until they have come to understand it's existence. I am glad to say that after a life of perpetual learning, I still come across new domains of awareness. It could be an archetypal concept like fractals. The most recent I encountered was the 3D labyrinthe wrought-iron celtic-knot lock-puzzle paradigm - not as exciting as ghosts maybe, but adding to my appreciation of a thought structure that makes appearances through history in different forms, and something that can add to my design toolset for software, electronics, nanotechnology, and such. I suppose it ranges from knots to genetics, possibly string theory too.
Anyhow, don't go dismissing things for lack of evidence. If you wait for evidence without making some creative leaps of faith, there is much you will miss in this world which could later become as apparent as things you are familiar with now.
You might try contemplating the total process by which you encounter evidence in the first place - observe your thoughts of inquiry, and the corresponding events which come your way. | | Biggles |
Nice to see you back 
> How could there be good evidence that ghosts exist? They don't live
> on the physical plane.
That seems like a get-out clause to me - the same one you could use for God, the devil, or the flying spaghetti monster. It's also the same reasoning that homeopaths use to justify selling bottles of water for ridiculous quantities of money - it works in a different way to science, therefore science cannot measure its effects.
>Some people can perceive them, others can't.
> I can imagine robot visitors from another planet claiming there is
> no good evidence that emotions exist.
Emotion can be observed, and measured. Even if the robots couldn't understand exactly what it was to feel (just as I can't understand exactly what great mathematicians feel when they look at an "elegant" equation), they could measure the physiological changes and brain chemistry that underpin emotion (as I could measure the mathematian's physiological response to encountering those equations).
> Come to think of it, there are a great many people who don't believe
> animals have consciousness.
There are quite a lot of people who don't think that *people* have consciousness. The balance of evidence still seems able to fall either way. One of those research areas where "wait and see" may be the wisest position.
> The closest you could get to evidence is confession under torture
> or truth serum that a person actually believes they saw a ghost.
And many of them will really believe that they saw a ghost. But if there is no evidence that they did, and plenty of evidence that what they claim to have seen is in fact impossible, should we really accept their assumptions? Think of all the people out there who practice dowsing, and the like - they may really, genuinely believe that they can locate water using a pendulum. They may be so certain that they can do it that they volunteer to be involved in a scientific study, which finds that they have a success rate explained entirely by chance. Just because people are honestly mistaken, does not mean that they are not mistaken.
> Not sure what you mean by near-death experiences, but they too are
> a perceived thing. The most you could get is a concensus on perceived
> events, and who's to say the things perceived even require being consistent
> to be valid? There may be a 100 different afterlives to choose from.
I have no idea what you mean here. Near-death experiences are actually described quite consistently - travelling down a tunnel towards a bright light, feeling of being outside the body...etc. All experiences that are neatly explained by the physiological events occurring in the body of someone nearing death.
> I agree with you on UFO's, even if they were from other stars, unless
> one defines paranormal as anything out of the ordinary. Heck, Bush
> is almost paranormal.
At least we agree on a couple of things 
> What I am getting at here is that by evidence, you mean 'scientific
> evidence', which is limited to the realm of cause and effect physical
> reality. There can be no proof of anything that lies ouside of the
> realm of cause and effect physical reality entirely from within the
> realm of cause and effect physical reality.
Science isn't necessarily about proof - it's about building up a body of evidence that tends to favour one possibility or another - often overwhelmingly (as with evolution versus creationism).
As for the rest of what you have to say here, I was somewhat impressed by that argument at one point (while I was reading Pascal a while back). But if something exists, completely outside the realm of physical reality, it's either pretty much irrelevant to the physical reality, or else it is capable of having a physical effect on the world, in which case those effects can be measured scientifically. Can I prove that a completely unmaterial plane exists? No. Do I really care? No. I exist in a plane that is physical and measurable, and a plane that isn't those things might as well not exist, as far as I am concerned.
I've read a few other arguments against this idea, but I forget where...I have far too much work to do to back-track over all the stuff I've read in the last year or two (I'm supposed to be reading about the physiology of the liver and biliary system right now...) Maybe when I find time to have a break (retirement).
> The most outstanding example of this is consciousness. People often
> confuse 'artificial intelligence' with machine consciousness. They
> are totally unrelated, just as their counterparts are within the human
> mind. One can have consciousness without sensory input or even thoughts
> in the form of words, pictures, feelings, or other physical sense
> cognates. For all we know, handheld calculators are already conscious,
> meditating on the input they receive from keystrokes.
Consciousness without sensory input? What exactly do you mean by that? And in the case of calculators, what are keystrokes if they are not sensory input? You may not have receptors and effectors (though it depends on how you define them), but the rest of the nervous system is there. (My point is not that calculators *are* conscious, but that you need to try harder to give me an example of something you consider may be conscious without sensory input).
> There are cases where realms overlap. One might scientifically scan
> facial expressions and dendryte activity and infer the existence of
> a system like emotions, but never have a handle on what they actually
> are. Emotions belong to what one could call a separate dimension,
> although their impact can be seen on the physical plane.
Thought is a difficult thing to get your head around. That doesn't mean they belong in a separate dimension. Once, people couldn't get their heads round what caused a disease to move from one person to the next (they often blamed the spiritual world as well), but germ theory helped that fall into place. Maybe the robots won't be able to understand emotions, until we have completely established their biochemical and electrical basis. We can then mimic that using computer software that the robots can download into their own systems. I can't see any reason why an unfeeling thing shouldn't be able to feel, if all the physical causes of a feeling were replicated. Obviously we're a long, long way off doing that (maybe we'll never be able to do it), but if we could, I don't think the robots would feel any less emotional. After all, there's really no reason to think that emotions draw on anything other than physical reality.
>Spiritual
> plane activity is even more so like this. Worldly events may have
> spiritual causes, but this can only be inferred in the physical plane;
> Only from within the spiritual plane can one comprehend the spiritual
> plane.
Worldy events have worldly causes. Let's try and fix this world before we go running off to fix another one...
> If you were to solely restrict yourself to the physical plane, you
> would have to dismiss the existence and value of consciousness, amongst
> other things.
Why? I think I'm pretty well restricted to the physical plane - I certainly don't look to spend any time in another one. I agree that the evidence for consciousness isn't all in yet, but I'm not ready to dismiss it just yet, either. I certainly can't see why it couldn't exist in a purely physical sense - unless you want to define consciousness as having to have a transcendental element...but I don't think that's the accepted definition.
I'll come back to finish reading this another time. I have too much work to do nowadays to get through a whole KR post! I must get on with the physiology of the liver, or I shall make a crappy doctor (in the physical plane at least). | | Kristal_Rose | | (reply to Biggles) posted 24-Oct-2007 9:20pm |
Emotions can't be measured. We have no idea how strongly the joy is perceived when massive-quanty-X of neurons fire.
"wait and see" - You're scaring me now.
I wasn't suggesting that confession torture could be evidence, rather saying that something from one dimension can't be ascertained in another. There could exist non-corporeal sleep fairies which send us dreams. Their effect would be huge, but maybe only 2% of the population ever meets these fairies. Even if you found the same supposed fairies were passing around identical dreams to people who did not know of each other, you'd still never have rock hard evidence of these fairies. Only those who had seen them and could compare notes would have evidence, and their evidence would not belong to the plane of physical matter. - Hard science is limited to the measurement of things which have a predictable effect in physical matter.
Discerning a spiritual plane rubric totally from within matter would be like estimating the lives and processes of directors and actors by watching a movie they were in.
So you agree there is a tunnel of white light experience, but believe it to be a purely physiological phenomena? With this line of thinking you have no hope of ever understanding such things, should they turn out to be the result of processes on a non-physical plane. To get anywhere there, you have to trust them, just as you have to trust the folks with microscopes about the existence of a realm of germs. If you dismiss the testimony of those with telescopes you have to dismiss the the existence of germs. The psychic domain is no different in that respect.
I believe the spiritual realm to be capable of having an effect on life just as movie crews have an effect on movies. Still, no predictable events exist to imply the exact nature of this movie crew, even though their affect on the movie is absolute.
I take it you've never meditated - no sensory input, no thoughts, still conscious. Consciousness observes, occupies, and resides in our thoughts and perception, but is not our thoughts and perception. It could just as easily reside in the perceptions and thoughts of a computer or calculator. (and you missed my point, calculators do have sensory input, sensory inputs and thought processes are not necessarily indicative of consciousness, nor is the lack of them necessarily indicative of lack of consciousness).
If you're a character in a movie, it might worth knowing about the domain of actors and stage crews, as they have a profound effect on your universe. Their plane wouldn't be irrelevant at all.
Hmm, you're totally missing this. Computers could mimic human thought and sensory perception to the finest detail, and still never feel or experience consciousness. If they could, the handheld calcualtor would already be there. The computer program that stumbles opon the thought "I think, therefore I am" and types it out to the world has not gained any new faculties of consciousness that weren't already present in the hand held calculator. Consciousness is not thought or perception.
???!! The evidence for consciousness is in your head (I dearly hope), the only place it could be. Good grief. If you deny the validity of your own perception in this regard, the existence of any physical reality is a moot point as well, your only evidence for it being your perception, and it's tidy cohesive elegance as a plausible existing system.
Of course you could become one of those sociopaths convinced that no one else has consciousness, but simply run like computers, not actually feeling the sensory input they react to. After all, there's no scientific evidence for it. This one of those situations though where compassionately projecting your own perceptons speculatively on to others is a good thing. |
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