Do you have any ideas that are not yet disbelieved?
Offline I see paranormal/metaphysical/new age/mystical ideas as complete hooey, but I'd like to be proven wrong on a few cases. There are some things that I still hope to be true, if evidence can be provided, though there hasn't been any yet, leaving such ideas as the last refuge of magical thinking for someone who doesn't believe in God and an afterlife. So here are some things that feel like a "maybe" rather than a "definitely not true," aka agnosticicism or "wimpy atheism."
-Out of body experiences. People claim to have them, and claim to have used remote vieweing, astral projection, and visited spiritual realms or contacted beings on other planes. Since they sound so convinced of it, these anecdotes are persuasive enough to make you think "maybe it did happen, rather than being induced by hallucinogens."
-Chi. People claim through years of study they can harness their internal energy and shoot fireballs, resist bladed weapons, put people asleep with a wave of the hand, etc. The anecdotes of seeing people doing these things, plus the whole sales pitch of undetectable inner energy being harnessed by you alone, plus its appearance in so many works of fiction, makes any nerd want to become an elite magical ninja capable of taking out any UFC champ with a couple hand waves, and healing their own wounds afterwards. Of course, this kind of thing would be taught systematically if it were true, and videos on youtube have only shown "tricks."
-Meditation. I think it has real physical results such as lowering blood pressure or heart rate. Spiritual results haven't been proven, but they usually seem promoted along with the physical meditation just for the heck of it. It would be nice if any of the magical woowoo associated with it were true, like the sixth chakra or the third eye or some mystical energy in the body or some spiritual enlightenment or unexplained higher level of consciousness, but so far it seems to be nothing more than sitting and breathing calmly.
I don't believe in these with any certainty, but just from hearing about them, it would be cool if they were true. Then again, all religion works on that premise. So I definitely don't. Unless there was some evidence. But since none of it exists then there isn't any evidence. But it would be cool if there was. Even if there isn't. But there might be. Or not. I guess I can wait to be proven wrong. But that implies it might be true. So I shouldn't wait. Unless I'm missing out on something that is true. Which it isn't. Unless I'm proven wrong. Which I won't be because there is no evidence. Unless there is somewhere. Even though there isn't any. Or is there?
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If I told you what they were....They might be disbelieved. But If I keep them to myself, the only person who can critique them is me.
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Ah.
Well, our understanding of this is still very rudimentray but hopefully sufficient.
To understand OBE, you must understand how introperceptive mechanisms work first:
There are the lesser known, but equally important introperceptive senses, which regulate balance and spatiotemporal relative position and geometric orientation in the world (inner ear and cochlear tubes) called proprioception, the tracking of movement and muscle memory called mechanoperception (this one is quite remarkable, it is controlled by grid neurons which array a lattice-like projection of external reality, dividing it into grid squares, such that grid neurons corresponding to said squares fire when movement is detected in said squares. Obviously, your brain does not project this onto your vision, as that would be extremely annoying. As a matter of fact, your brain, while efficiently organizing reality, tweaks a lot of things so as not to appear unsettling. For example, the eyes never stop moving, they, even when fixed on a point, are making a jerky motion called sacchares. However, this is extremely unsettling in appearance so the brain eliminates it from the visual projection. It can be detected only by watching someone else’s eyes in the mirror.
Now, inside the somatosensory cortex is an area of regulation whose function is the introperceptive spatiotemporal projection of field of vision behind the eyes. This was demonstrated quite recently, I believe, by neuroscientists who blocked the transmitter across the synaptic vescicle for this area and hence, the projection of vision which was simulated/stimulated in the patient was outside the field of projected vision by lateral and longitudanal planes which would be impossible under normal circumstances. We can, by means of disrupting introperceptive spatiotemporal positioning, force this affect whereby the field of vision is projected at angles which are external to the projection of vision behind the eyes. The result, the person appears to view their own body as if standing beside or overtop it.
Which explanation do you think is "cooler"?
I mean, which is cooler, some ridiculous woo-woo nonsense...or a fully operational Functional Near Infared Spectroscoper stocked with a compliment of neuroangiogram isotopes? Soon, if we have our way, we shall be able to make such calculations down to the supramolecular level regarding neurotransmitters in single ganglion clusters. We are talking picomole accuracy (picomole= 10^-12 mol)
"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.
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Chi - I think it's useful in some martial arts disciplines as a metaphor. It helps you focus and direct your attention and movements. I've had people swear to me they've seen it manifest as heat waves, etc., but I've never seen anything of the sort, and don't trust the judgement of those witnesses based on their track records. Still other times, people have attested to the power of "chi" in demonstrations of physical power: like someone being immovable, or able to send a subject flying across the room with an open palm strike. Again, I've never seen those demonstrations, but I've seen Derren Brown demonstrate similar things, which suggests to me what I'd suspected before: that similar effects can be achieved through psychology alone. Finally, I wanted to mention that a high level student of Chi Gong had explained during a class I was in that scientists had "recently" discovered an inexplicable system in the human body for conveyance of a mysterious liquid... hinting that it was scientific support for a real, physical "chi." People sometimes think I'm a buzzkill, I think, cos I hate that kind of anecdotal bullshit. They can never explain or substantiate their claims, or even cite a source: they just put it out there, and we're supposed to go, "Ooh," and go home smug and satisfied about it. No sir, not good enough.
Astral Projection/Remote Viewing/OOBE - I was heavily into this as a teen, as well as methods for "skrying" supposedly employed by Nostradamus. (I burned weird incense, stared into bowls of water or candle flames.) I experienced sleep paralysis on several occasions. The experience is terrifying, as it's accompanied by a loud "rushing" sound. Once I had the sensation of being an object the size of a tennis ball, and able to move freely within the empty container of my body. Another time, I "flew" through a birch forrest, observing a dilapidated farm building. The experiences weren't confirmed by anything, so it was an interesting experience, but not science.
Meditation - I don't think this belongs with other woo-woo things. The benefits of contemplation and relaxation should be self-evident, not really relying on a supernatural explanation.
-Out of body experiences. "It's a spiral staircase." The government pissed away millions on remote viewing studies and didn't get shit out of it.
As for "out of body," that's been shown to be caused by a lack of oxygen to the brain. It happens a lot to people training to be pilots. When they are doing tests to see how many "g's" the would-be pilot can take, some of them pass out for a few minutes. Afterward, they claim out of body experiences. It can also happen to coma patients. A mild form of this occurs when we dream because our breathing shallows as we sleep.
-Chi. Man, Houdini must've had chi falling out of his ass... But since chi isn't real, he just learned how to do magic tricks. Did you know that by applying the correct leverage, you can lift objects heavier than you could typically pick up? Also, if you use leverage correctly, you can make it so no one can move you. Houdini could also take any punch. It's a myth that a punch to the appendix killed him. So "chi" tricks are just tricks.
-Meditation. If you can sit down and think about things calmly from time to time, you're bound to see a difference in your life. More than likely, you won't get as angry as you usually do. You get to collect your thoughts. Maybe you can have some very creative moments in that time.
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So is this basically forced dreaming while awake? Then it could be explained by science. But is it healthy to do? If having these visions lowers oxygen then some of the experiences might be from dying neurons.
I don't think anyone's claimed "having visions lowers oxygen to the brain," but I'll suppose you meant the reverse. Unless there was something physically wrong with me that I didn't know about, reduced oxygen levels were not involved. The closest conventional explanation would probably be lucid dreaming, which I know some people are able to practice at will when they realize they're dreaming and are able to remain asleep. I wasn't able to do that, so I took advantage of the sleep paralysis I'd experienced before. From what I've read, paralysis takes place during normal sleep to prevent physical reactions to mental stimulation while dreaming (which isn't, ahem, infallible, as any teenage boy will realize). For reasons I don't recall, the mind can become partly conscious while the body remains paralyzed: I had brought this on by altering my sleep pattern repeatedly. Once in that state, I only had to overcome the terror and isolation of the feeling to experience the hallucinations.
I didn't mean to say it was somehow beyond science, just that my methods were unscientific. If I had been able to confirm details about a location I'd never been to in person, I would have the some data to work with: but I don't.
Lucid dreaming is fun. I used to be able to do that in high school. In a dream world, anything can happen, and if you take control of a dream, you can do anything you can imagine.
What evidence do you expect to see? Anything someone says on the internet could be a lie, and anything you see in a video could be just special effects. But, if you assume that no evidence can exist, and therefore don't bother to look for any, you're not likely to find any. On the other hand, if you're too eager to believe that something you see or hear is true, you might end up being taken in by a scam.
The bottom line is, if you want to learn about these things, you'll have to observe them for yourself with a critical eye. If you think they're not worth your time, don't bother with them, because if anybody could just sit down and meditate for a few hours and then suddenly get the ability to levitate or see the future, you'd see just about everyone doing it. And really, unless the knowledge is of some practical value to you, does it really matter if you know the truth or not?
It's all bullshit. New Age woo-woos love to say that their shit isn't reliable enough to be tested, but the bottom line is that either it's more reliable than chance, or it's not. If it is, then it's reliable enough to be tested. If it's not, then it's useless.
I did my time in chi (actually ki -- It was a Japanese style) based martial arts, though I never thought of it as anything other than a psychological visualization technique. Imagining your ki flowing down your arm and out your pinky really does help with getting your physical technique right. I've since moved on to full-contact combat sports, in which physical attributes are trained and concepts like chi/ki are laughed at. No surprises here: Combat sports training produces vastly superior fighters. That claim is very easily testable, and has been proven true time and time again. Every time a "chi master" steps into the ring with a sport fighter, he gets his ass kicked. Hard.
I did once have an interesting experience with a Tai Chi instructor who led me through a "demonstration of chi." He had me do a series of Tai Chi movements and then put my hands close together as if I was holding an invisible ball. There was a very tangible sensation of a ball of static electricity between my hands, which he said was chi. Now, I still don't believe in chi, but what the hell was that?
I've had the occasional lucid dream, but there's nothing paranormal about that. It's a very cool but completely mundane phenomenon. It's not that hard to train yourself to lucid dream: Just get in the habit of doing "reality checks" throughout the day. Look at a sign, look away, and then look at it again. If you're awake, it won't change, but if you're dreaming, it probably will. If you get in the habit of doing this while you're awake, you'll eventually find yourself doing it in a dream, and when you do, you'll know you're dreaming. Bam. Instant lucid dream.
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I think that same should be said of all of the above concepts.
My idea of 'woo woo' is when a metaphorical idea is treated literally.
I think that all the stories about Chi, Meditation, OBEs etc are based in some sort of truth, and the concepts have value when not treated like literal absolutes.
It's when people try to infer from the metaphorical to the literal (and vice versa) that things get messy.
When someone says the believe that Chi is real, that doesn't necessarily mean that they think Chi is a literal scientific concept, they find the way that it has been applied to be 'correct' and 'useful' to everyday experience.
I think the problems occur when we try and over-simplify our concept of belief. When we assume that a belief has to be about 'literal truth', it leads some of us to deny the validity of metaphorical concepts as they aren't literal and leads others of us to try and tamper with our literal beliefs to defend the metaphorical.
That's why I think that demanding people to prove beliefs scientifically can be counter intuitive as many things we call 'belief' aren't the kind of propositions that science deals with.
That's a neat idea, but I don't think it would work for me. Sometimes I still realize that I'm having a dream, but the problem is that I'm never in the dream anymore.
LOL
Try practicing controlling it with your mind. See if you can move it around, and get it to change shape. Then try wrapping it around your arms and legs, and see if you feel the same sensation there. If you can do that, then get that Tai Chi instructor to face away from you, and move the ball of chi into contact with different parts of his body. Then, see if he can guess which parts of his body you're moving it to with more reliability than chance.
During my transition from believer to skeptic, I dealt with a lot of these issues myself. Probably my biggest issues were with psychics (something that, despite my nearly lifelong atheism, I had always believed in)ahd chi/ki powers. The fact is, if you look hard enough, you can find evidence debunking every one of these nonsense ideas. The only way that you won't disbelieve is if you are a true believer, i.e. someone who will believe something no matter how plainly and explicitly is has been shown to be false.
OBEs have been thouroughly explained here, so I'll skip that one. Meditation has also been sufficiently examined as a perfectly normal physical effect. Personally, if I was in a very relaxed, contemplative state and my blood pressure didn't lower, I'd be a little worried.
Chi is the tough one. All over the place, you can find videos (which are rather unreliable at best) and anecdotal evidence (which 99% of the time is completely unreliable) of people exhibiting all sorts of crazy powers by harnessing the power of chi. Lately, this has been a topic of discussion on a podcast called The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. (www.skepticsguide.org) The last two episodes has discussed the possibility of chi powers and they did a very good job of explaining them. They also pointed out this blog (scienceblogs.com/neurotopia/2007/10/martial_idiocy.php) which examines claims of chi powers and even includes a really funny (if also sad and painful) video of a chi power demonstration. Watch it. Trust me...
They also discuss the "dim mak" Chinese touch of death, which can kill or paralyze person just through one touch. This and many, many other "effects" rely heavily on a placebo effect. When this is done on people that are outside of the practitioner's own school, it has been shown not to work pretty much 100% of the time. It's kind of like a faith healer...when people come up on stage, they truly believe that they are being "slain in the spirit" or some other such bullshit. For them, it becomes real; they are incapable of standing because they believe that they are incapable of standing.
If you ever start to feel your belief in the "strange and unusual" start to overcome your rational thinking, you should pay a visit to www.randi.org, www.theskepticsguide.org, www.skepdic.com or one of the many other web sites devoted to scientific inquiry and skepticism.
You can't rationally argue out something that was not rationally argued in.
I experienced an OBE once when I was around 3-4. I also saw jesus' face formed by the branches of a tree once. Another time I saw a black cat made of smoke run around my room and talk to me briefly.
I don't think that any of those experiences were real other than my misperception of reality. Just some odd neurons misfiring.
Luckily those are the only three odd things I can think of that I have experienced. If that crap happened every day I'd be committed to an asylum.
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Ahem.
This statement boldly claims that it is impossible for a person to have a legitimate reason to believe in any of the concepts the statement applies to. Ignoring for the moment any and all contrived situations (e.g. a person is raised in captivity and forced to watch Chris Angel's Mindfreak videos every week of their life), this statement also implies in no uncertain terms that all of the referenced phenomena are false.
If anyone on these forums can show me strong evidence against the existence of chi/ki/qi, that person will instantly become my personal hero. Note that radio commentary does not constitute strong evidence any more than anectodes do, and that a failed demonstration only debunks the combination of the concept and the performance... not the concept itself.
Now, you might say that it's unreasonable to ask for strong evidence against a supernatural concept when I haven't presented strong evidence for that concept. And, I would agree with you, if I were trying to support an argument stating that the concept is real. But to not only claim that such a concept is ficticious, but to further claim that no reasonable person would disagree with you, regardless of their life experiences which you can't possibly know, in my opinion requires some substantial supporting evidence to be credible.
Granted, anecdotal evidence is weak evidence at best, but unless the anecdote is an outright lie or a false memory, it's based on an actual event. Actually witnessing an event is considerably stronger evidence, and being an actor in an event is stronger evidence still.
So, before you claim that someone is irrational for believing something that you don't, please be prepared to back up your claim with rational arguments and/or strong evidence.
I understand where you are coming from, but there is an inherent problem in this.
This kind of "debunking" has to take place on a case-by-case basis. You can show a video of a "chi master" miserably failing a demonstration, at which poing you can argue..."Well what about this other guy?" After he is debunked, you can say "What about this other guy?", and so on and so forth. At some point, I would have to ask for evidence in favor of these powers. Not a video or an anecdot, but evidence.
The fact is that no one has produced any credible scientific studies showing the existance of chi/ki/qi powers. Trying to prove that it doesn't exist would be an exercise in futility...there will always be someone claiming that, while everyone else was fake, he/she is the real deal. The same claim is made in the psychic and religious realms. "I'll believe in god/psychics/whatever until you can prove it doesn't exist."
What would you even consider as evidence against chi powers?
You can't rationally argue out something that was not rationally argued in.
So far, we agree. Although, I would hope that if enough of these claims were publicly debunked, the average person would take the same position and give such claims little credit until they actually saw some convincing evidence. Not that I would expect people to... at least not in this century... but I would hope.
Here I have to conditionally disagree. If by "produced" you mean presented to the general public, then I accept this statement.
If, on the other hand, by "produced" you mean created, then I have to point out that it's not unthinkable that such a study could have been done and never published. Granted, this scenario seems unlikely, but my point is we don't know for sure, so I wouldn't consider this statement to be a fact.
Yes, this is a problem, whether a given phenomena is real or not. If it is real, then the fakes discredit the phenomena. If it's not real, then it can lead to confusion about the nature of reality. In either case, gullible people get scammed out of some of their money.
Choosing to believe propositions based on the lack of available proof to the contrary is likely to lead to the formation of false beliefs. If applied universally, it would also lead the formation of self-contradictory beliefs.
For example:
"Psychic phenomena exist." Hmm... I can't prove it false, so I guess I'll believe it.
"Psychic phenomena do not exist." Hmm... I can't prove it false, so I guess I'll believe it.
Note that choosing to believe that psychic phenomena do not exist is not the same as choosing not to believe that psychic phenomena exist.
Taking the example a step further:
"It's impossible to prove whether or not psychic phenomena exist." Hmm... I can't prove it false, so I guess I'll believe it.
Honestly, I have no idea. Moreover, I suspect that no such evidence exists. However, if someone were to prove me wrong and present such evidence, I would be both exceedingly impressed and exceedingly grateful.
heh, when i was young, i wanted to do research into psychokenesis/telepathy --- two of my personal pseudoscince favorites, along with the multiple worlds/dimentions theories.
...although, i am becoming convinced that some form of radiotelepathy may be possible . . . and i can't be the only one out there who wants a google bar in her brain.
or maybe i read waaaay to much warren ellis.....
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