Red, Luminon isn't being a troll, but it comes down to this:

 

1. His belief is based on special, personal revelation.

2. He will not accept scenarios which will falsify his belief.

3. He is surrounded by a community/family of like-minded folks.

 

You can't argue him down, there isn't any way to do it within that framework.  Everyone tries though, I know I have.

 

We hear a noise or think we see a shadow move - our mind fills in any blanks with what it thinks must be there.

I watched National Geographic: Incredible Human Machine recently and it talked about how our senses and our minds interact when there is a lot of or impartial bits of information coming in. This program used the example of a guy riding his bike through the city and how his mind and eyes kept up with all of the information coming through.

The mind apparently literally fills in blanks where information is imprecise. As he passes by a vehicle and sees what he believes is a car door opening, a lot of times he remembers what the person getting out looks like. Even if he never actually saw the person, or only saw the briefest of glimpses of him, the bikers mind fills in the necessary pieces to complete the image.

I suspect this is one of the major reasons that eye witness accounts are unreliable in legal proceedings. The people can be positive they saw the person but did they? They likely saw someone, but only when they laid eyes on the prime suspect did their minds piece them into the picture. Maybe the mind got it right, it's a very clever machine after all, but that is beside the point. The point is that the mind won't let a picture stay half empty if it has access to something that it can draw from to fill it in reasonably.

After I watch a horror movie, every shadow looks exactly like whatever jerky, long haired evil girl was in the movie. My mind puts it there, because that's what it thinks is supposed to be there. It sees a shadow out of the corner of my eye and viola! It's now a scary little evil chick (why are they the villains in horror movies all little girls now?).

I'm in a dark basement, I'm nervous, I hear odd noises, I say "Ok buddy, calm down, you don't believe in that crap" but it's there. My mind, even though I am trying to tell it otherwise, keeps putting boogie-men in those dark corners because that's what it thinks completes the picture.

1: Yea, and what you just said falls under special revelation.

2: We've been over this lotsa times.  Designing a test for a particular woo-bility isn't hard.

 

Your framework is faith, faith that your own faculties are telling you the truth.  When all external and objective evidence points to A and you are still convinced B is true based on your special revelation, that is faith.  There are more elegant ways to explain the things you describe without resorting to the esoteric monstrosity.

When you accept scientific evaluation, you also have to accept that you might be wrong.  When science and belief collide, your decision to choose belief equates faith.

 

 

A Nobel prizewinner is reporting that DNA can be generated from its teleported "quantum imprint"

A STORM of scepticism has greeted experimental results emerging from the lab of a Nobel laureate which, if confirmed, would shake the foundations of several fields of science. "If the results are correct," says theoretical chemist Jeff Reimers of the University of Sydney, Australia, "these would be the most significant experiments performed in the past 90 years, demanding re-evaluation of the whole conceptual framework of modern chemistry."

Luc Montagnier, who shared the Nobel prize for medicine in 2008 for his part in establishing that HIV causes AIDS, says he has evidence that DNA can send spooky electromagnetic imprints of itself into distant cells and fluids. If that wasn't heretical enough, he also suggests that enzymes can mistake the ghostly imprints for real DNA, and faithfully copy them to produce the real thing. In effect this would amount to a kind of quantum teleportation of the DNA.

Many researchers contacted for comment by New Scientist reacted with disbelief. Gary Schuster, who studies DNA conductance effects at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, compared it to "pathological science". Jacqueline Barton, who does similar work at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, was equally sceptical. "There aren't a lot of data given, and I don't buy the explanation," she says. One blogger has suggested Montagnier should be awarded an IgNobel prize.

Yet the results can't be dismissed out of hand. "The experimental methods used appear comprehensive," says Reimers. So what have Montagnier and his team actually found?

Full details of the experiments are not yet available, but the basic set-up is as follows. Two adjacent but physically separate test tubes were placed within a copper coil and subjected to a very weak extremely low frequency electromagnetic field of 7 hertz. The apparatus was isolated from Earth's natural magnetic field to stop it interfering with the experiment. One tube contained a fragment of DNA around 100 bases long; the second tube contained pure water.

After 16 to 18 hours, both samples were independently subjected to the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a method routinely used to amplify traces of DNA by using enzymes to make many copies of the original material. The gene fragment was apparently recovered from both tubes, even though one should have contained just water (see diagram).

DNA was only recovered if the original solution of DNA - whose concentration has not been revealed - had been subjected to several dilution cycles before being placed in the magnetic field. In each cycle it was diluted 10-fold, and "ghost" DNA was only recovered after between seven and 12 dilutions of the original. It was not found at the ultra-high dilutions used in homeopathy.

Physicists in Montagnier's team suggest that DNA emits low-frequency electromagnetic waves which imprint the structure of the molecule onto the water. This structure, they claim, is preserved and amplified through quantum coherence effects, and because it mimics the shape of the original DNA, the enzymes in the PCR process mistake it for DNA itself, and somehow use it as a template to make DNA matching that which "sent" the signal (arxiv.org/abs/1012.5166).

"The biological experiments do seem intriguing, and I wouldn't dismiss them," says Greg Scholes of the University of Toronto in Canada, who last year demonstrated that quantum effects occur in plants. Yet according to Klaus Gerwert, who studies interactions between water and biomolecules at the Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany, "It is hard to understand how the information can be stored within water over a timescale longer than picoseconds."

"The structure would be destroyed instantly," agrees Felix Franks, a retired academic chemist in London who has studied water for many years. Franks was involved as a peer reviewer in the debunking of a controversial study in 1988 which claimed that water had a memory (see "How 'ghost molecules' were exorcised&quot. "Water has no 'memory'," he says now. "You can't make an imprint in it and recover it later."

Despite the scepticism over Montagnier's explanation, the consensus was that the results deserve to be investigated further. Montagnier's colleague, theoretical physicist Giuseppe Vitiello of the University of Salerno in Italy, is confident that the result is reliable. "I would exclude that it's contamination," he says. "It's very important that other groups repeat it."

In a paper last year (Interdisciplinary Sciences: Computational Life Sciences, DOI: 10.1007/s12539-009-0036-7), Montagnier described how he discovered the apparent ability of DNA fragments and entire bacteria both to produce weak electromagnetic fields and to "regenerate" themselves in previously uninfected cells. Montagnier strained a solution of the bacterium Mycoplasma pirum through a filter with pores small enough to prevent the bacteria penetrating. The filtered water emitted the same frequency of electromagnetic signal as the bacteria themselves. He says he has evidence that many species of bacteria and many viruses give out the electromagnetic signals, as do some diseased human cells.

Montagnier says that the full details of his latest experiments will not be disclosed until the paper is accepted for publication. "Surely you are aware that investigators do not reveal the detailed content of their experimental work before its first appearance in peer-reviewed journals," he says.

 

The story is from New Scientist.

 

 

Atheistextremist: Are you serious? No shit? Scientists really discovered that? In that case, I want to congratulate the science, everything is going according to plan. The esoteric slowly becomes exoteric. Please, make sure you include news on this in your science articles.
Yes, this is partially a ghost, except imagine not just one cell or DNA, but the whole body. And not just the body, that's biologic automaton. Imagine that this body is still conscious - even more than before, because it does not get wornout with old age. That's an early stage of a ghost, because even the etheric double dies and dissolves. What life is beyond that, only Robert Allan Monroe knows, and readers of his books.

Of course, we esotericists have some idea about such phenomena. What we're seeing here is not a quantum leap, it's etheric matter that's involved in every living matter and most of non-living. Cells grow according to template of their etheric counterpart, they don't have such a detailed blueprint in their DNA. The etheric double may seem like a body of light, because that's what it uses instead of blood and other fluids. Energy.
One of esoteric healing techniques is to take a strong, healthy healer (with high light vibes) and impose his electromagnetic radiation on sick and weak cells of the patient. The cells will start working according to the example and then such a person may for example immediately lose alcoholic or nicotine craving, as long as he maintains clean body. Such an abstinent is safe as long as he never drinks alcohol again.
 

All this light that cells radiate is a part of our aura. Aura was recorded by Polycontrast Interference photography (better late than never, science) and on the photographs there you can see for yourself basically what I can easily perceive through my touch sense. I don't see almost anything of these things, they're mainly tangible to me, but I know a couple of individuals who can see them.
 

What you just presented to me are merely illusions, that means, how brain naturally interprets the input of senses. There is nothing mysterious about it, we know them, because the material for study is plentiful. 
What I mean is something entirely different, something not yet scientifically studied, but much more fascinating. As a comparison, you metaphorically mean seeing a vague boogey-man-shaped move in the corner of your peripheral vision, and when you turn your sight, there's nobody. I metaphorically mean seeing the boogey man right in front of you, in full light, extreme detail and looking unlike nothing you ever saw or wanted to see or feared to see, here for you to look as long as you want. Without any pathologic state that might offer an explanation. This is the level of realism try to describe metaphorically.

By pointing out natural sensory illusions you just miss the point.

Isn't evolution grand! To think that, the ninnies who let their imaginations get the better of them survived *because* they were ninnies who let their imaginations get the better of them.

I hope the researchers are smart enough to rule out the trivial problems, like impure water samples, etc. They should replicate their own experiment, before they send the word out.

Yeah, such disclaimer is necessary to appease angry and jealous institutions.

The question is, if these crazy looking effects are based on ultra-weak biologic light emissions, that reflect health state of the person.

You presented evidence of something like margin of error and background noise of human senses. As for measure and quantification, that's also a problem of processing the sensory input. Blame human brain, not senses.

What I mean is not anything within margin of error of our senses. I mean a clear, strong and regular signal on par with other clear and strong signals which are common to us.

 

What confirmation bias? I'm the one best qualified to know IF my senses receive something. If I say there is something weird going on, then I'm most probably right, unless it is already studied by science. So far, I saw no study that would cover similar cases. Scientific worldview is the lowest common denominator of reality. The most common phenomena, most tangible, profitable or most easiest to study get studied first. Anyone may experience something yet unseen, it's just about coincidence. What then? Those who are ahead in exploration but behind in understanding, are supposed to shut up and don't skip proper trials, right? Or do them themselves, somehow.

 

 

I wonder what you would tell a guy with synaesthesia. That he's just imagining things or lies to gain attention and be popular?

 

OK, so you presume what? That this is a machine built to create random color patterns on screen, which is meant for the engineer to gather money by giving a fake diagnosis to people? What if he just tries to capture and ampifly something like the mentioned light, radiated by living cells? I think the an appropriate holiday for a devoted skeptic would be to travel around the world with his medical diagnosis and perform tests with miracle men who have magical aura-recording cameras and other similar devices. Would be a nice reality show.

Obtuse? In my opinion I just disagree. You know, when I first came to the website, people mentioned many logical fallacies that I didn't recognize, because I didn't know the english words. Is 'obtuse' your favorite word, or it's some term for fallacy?

And how is that a problem? If human senses are good enough to keep us alive while driving a car in full speed, then they are good enough for my purposes. Here, the purpose is not to detect a tiny object of quarter a milimeter. It will completely suffice to tell, if there is let's say an object of a size of a basketball. I think human senses are good enough for that. Is that clear enough?

Well, let's pick the point apart. I am the best qualified to tell, if I perceive something. Let's say my hand goes numb and even if I touch a table, I won't feel it. Another person standing nearby would say I can feel the table, because I lay my hand on it, but I would not say that. Who is correct?

Another example, a rationalist says that he does not believe in his senses. An empiricist then punches him in face, saying that he just imagines the pain. Again, who is correct?

That the brain does not have to make any conclusions about a sensory input, it can just be aware of it. Confirmation bias arises from a desire for the reality to be one way or another. It requires that you wish for something in advance, and then the brain is influenced, right?

And what if it happens every day? What if I every day check on the same thing and find it existing? Then it is pretty obvious, that something is going on.

I meant scientific worldview as a sum of facts gathered by scientific process to this date.
Science removes all human bias, but does not include all facts. It leaves out facts for which we don't know yet how to test them. In controlled environment the possible choices get very narrow, so we get relatively less facts, than may be observed in uncontrolled circumstances. But we get them for sure every time, that's what controlled environment is mean for.
Therefore, it is natural that in uncontrolled environment (real life) people observe things which science does not yet understand or take notice of them. I get wary in company of people who think, that nobody should live ahead of what scientific institutions discover. Small private observations can be just as valuable and unique, as big discoveries of professional teams.

I don't need people to be convinced or interested. That would be nice, but it would be realistic and helpful, if they reach into their memory and pull out somewhere messages on this topic, similar scientific experiments or possible scientific explanations of weird but fully realistic phenomena happening. Instead of letting their mind go loose and theoretize little, they start demanding evidunce and blind studies, like I would be a director of Mayo clinic or something. What sort of constructive approach is this? I mean, they're pretty laid-back in other kinds of discussion. It would be nice from them to consider things as I say them. If I say, for example, "I saw holy Virgin Mary," then I mean I saw Virgin Mary in all supernatural parade and took a damn good look of her, to make sure she is not a girl-shaped piece of rock, not a a bluish white rag hanging on branch, and not a part of local Sunday school christmas theatre.
Claims can't be proven here and now, but want to be able at least to make people understand that I say things exactly as I perceive them, and I perceive them as anyone in my place would, and better than most. I have seen and experienced many weird things, taking a damn good notice of them even if I can't prove them is my hobby. So if they degrade the account of experience to find an easy "explanation," they should be prepared that I will disagree. I have to defend my honor as a precise observer of weird phenomena

Good!!!! Finally a fully logical conclusion!