Psience Quest

Heh, well then back to square one. 

If I'm being asked what I find of interest and what would cause me to think of leaving this forum, I'll try to put it in a nutshell.

- Evidence and resources pertaining to psi, afterlife, consciousness, philosophy and science are all obviously preferred and should be the main focus.

- Borderline conspiracy theories such as whether the establishment or mainstream media is perceived to be suppressing information or spreading disinformation should be discussed. Particularly when such information is pertinent to our core discussions.

- Politics? Perhaps from a spiritual perspective such as why has the collective consciousness brought about a situation with two crazy leaders threatening to launch a nuclear war (that's an example, not an invitation to defend DT).

- Religion? When the debate moves into whether Satan is at large or whether God should smite ISIS I have one foot out of the door. Much more of that kind of thing and I'm gone for good.

- Judgement. I really don't enjoy the judgemental tone of some posts (not that I've noticed any here so far). If, as many believe, this reality is one in which we learn by experiencing many lives, some as pretty vile human beings, then the focus should be on trying to understand the lessons rather than judge each other. No doubt I'll be caught out being judgemental often - we are all human - but perhaps we should try to be less so.

Finally, there has to be some moderation otherwise we will lose people of good will for the sake of tolerating spoilers. Personal attacks should be deleted and combatants should be asked to continue feuds by way of PM. Banning should always be a last resort and reserved mainly for obvious trolls.

(2017-08-15, 08:36 PM)Kamarling Wrote: [ -> ]Judgement. I really don't enjoy the judgemental tone of some posts (not that I've noticed any here so far). If, as many believe, this reality is one in which we learn by experiencing many lives, some as pretty vile human beings, then the focus should be on trying to understand the lessons rather than judge each other. No doubt I'll be caught out being judgemental often - we are all human - but perhaps we should try to be less so.

I think this is part of why I a[m] wary of political posts, including my own. I think many of us are on the older side, at least over the 30 mark, and we're all a bit set in our ways I suspect.

Political posts - again, including my own - come off as proselytizing about why we should think of things a certain way, rather than a person coming in honestly believing they're going to change their minds. This ties into conspiracy theories as well - I await the day when someone remarks that their "side" is supported by a globe-spanning conspiracy or alien/interdimensional demonic entity.

As R. Scott Bakker once put it, "No one ever says *they* are Chosen and *we* are Damned."

I just don't see how politics or conspiracy theory relate in any way to the stated subject matter of this web site. 

I mean- we don't talk about sailing do we? Or barbecue. or making beer. All of these things have merit. I'm not saying they are inherently bad, or out-of-bounds to me: they are simply not applicable to the point of this forum. Are they? Isn't this obvious?

Just because the owner of a web site many of us frequented happened to have an odd affinity for these things, I don't see why that should steer this site in that direction. If those topics are of interest to some then I think they should find a site where those topics or relevant to the central theme of the site: perhaps skeptiko.com for instance. I just don't see how these things can be interpreted as affiliated with psi in any way.

Yes- of course I can ignore those threads. But for the same reason I'm am suggesting that we shouldn't have a beer or sailing thread that others must ignore, I'd rather not have a CT thread that I must ignore.

Need a more specific logistical reason? 
Ok here's one: every time I visit the site, I look at the "new posts" tab to see what I've missed and might want to take a look at. I would really rather not have a list of 10 posts that have a high probability of being interesting, turn into a list of 20 things, half of which are non sequitur.

In other words- don't clutter up the pertinent stuff with irrelevant postings. Please don't get emotional about the terminology- By pertinent I mean directly related to psi, and by irrelevant I mean not related.  Your beer recipe is certainly important (at least to you) but it is clearly irrelevant here at psiencequest.

I don't get to decide, but since I do get to voice an opinion,,, that's mine.

I think we are all quite fortunate to have these sorts of "problems".

(2017-08-16, 12:30 AM)jkmac Wrote: [ -> ]I just don't see how politics or conspiracy theory relate in any way to the stated subject matter of this web site. 

I mean- we don't talk about sailing do we? Or barbecue. or making beer. All of these things have merit. I'm not saying they are inherently bad, or out-of-bounds to me: they are simply not applicable to the point of this forum. Are they? Isn't this obvious?

Just because the owner of a web site many of us frequented happened to have an odd affinity for these things, I don't see why that should steer this site in that direction. If those topics are of interest to some then I think they should find a site where those topics or relevant to the central theme of the site: perhaps skeptiko.com for instance. I just don't see how these things can be interpreted as affiliated with psi in any way.

Yes- of course I can ignore those threads. But for the same reason I'm am suggesting that we shouldn't have a beer or sailing thread that others must ignore, I'd rather not have a CT thread that I must ignore.

Need a more specific logistical reason? 
Ok here's one: every time I visit the site, I look at the "new posts" tab to see what I've missed and might want to take a look at. I would really rather not have a list of 10 posts that have a high probability of being interesting, turn into a list of 20 things, half of which are non sequitur.

In other words- don't clutter up the pertinent stuff with irrelevant postings. Please don't get emotional about the terminology- By pertinent I mean directly related to psi, and by irrelevant I mean not related.  Your beer recipe is certainly important (at least to you) but it is clearly irrelevant here at psiencequest.

I don't get to decide, but since I do get to voice an opinion,,, that's mine.

One of the subforums is called UFOs. How can you even begin to consider the subject without tying in conspiracies? It's impossible.

(2017-08-16, 02:07 AM)chuck Wrote: [ -> ]One of the subforums is called UFOs. How can you even begin to consider the subject without tying in conspiracies? It's impossible.

I wouldn't have any problem whatsoever with people making political and conspiracy threads and posts when it's related to those topics, and I would think they should then be posted inside all of those related subforums. I'm just questioning, like others, the pertinence of having significant separate space for straight politics and world affairs-conspiracies when a specific "psi" theme isn't immediately relevant (I'm distinguishing this from the meta level that Jim was alluding to a bit higher up).

(2017-08-16, 02:07 AM)chuck Wrote: [ -> ]

(2017-08-16, 12:30 AM)jkmac Wrote: [ -> ]I just don't see how politics or conspiracy theory relate in any way to the stated subject matter of this web site. 

I mean- we don't talk about sailing do we? Or barbecue. or making beer. All of these things have merit. I'm not saying they are inherently bad, or out-of-bounds to me: they are simply not applicable to the point of this forum. Are they? Isn't this obvious?

Just because the owner of a web site many of us frequented happened to have an odd affinity for these things, I don't see why that should steer this site in that direction. If those topics are of interest to some then I think they should find a site where those topics or relevant to the central theme of the site: perhaps skeptiko.com for instance. I just don't see how these things can be interpreted as affiliated with psi in any way.

Yes- of course I can ignore those threads. But for the same reason I'm am suggesting that we shouldn't have a beer or sailing thread that others must ignore, I'd rather not have a CT thread that I must ignore.

Need a more specific logistical reason? 
Ok here's one: every time I visit the site, I look at the "new posts" tab to see what I've missed and might want to take a look at. I would really rather not have a list of 10 posts that have a high probability of being interesting, turn into a list of 20 things, half of which are non sequitur.

In other words- don't clutter up the pertinent stuff with irrelevant postings. Please don't get emotional about the terminology- By pertinent I mean directly related to psi, and by irrelevant I mean not related.  Your beer recipe is certainly important (at least to you) but it is clearly irrelevant here at psiencequest.

I don't get to decide, but since I do get to voice an opinion,,, that's mine.

One of the subforums is called UFOs. How can you even begin to consider the subject without tying in conspiracies? It's impossible.

Chuck: 
Surely you can see that there is stark difference between an occasional post or even a whole thread touching on a UFO conspiracy in a UFO forum, vs a whole sub-section of the web site dedicated to the general subject matter of Conspiracy Theory. Clearly those are two very different things. Yes??

The former is totally reasonable and would be expected, while the later is outside the psi topical scope of the web site. At the risk of being blunt,,, isn't this obvious?

It's one thing if someone wants to talk about CT and wants to advocate for including it herein. I say, go right ahead and advocate away. That's the point of this thread right? To sort through this issue and find out people's positions. But please don't insult my intelligence by suggesting that the whole subject matter of CT should be specifically included here because one can't talk about UFOs w/o mentioning it. That is a pretty hollow argument.

(2017-08-16, 02:07 AM)chuck Wrote: [ -> ]One of the subforums is called UFOs. How can you even begin to consider the subject without tying in conspiracies? It's impossible.

Quite easily. From what I've read about the subject, there really *isn't* a conspiracy around UFOs in the sense that most people who have got their ideas from 'The X-Files' or the 1970s-80s conspiracy literature would understand it. More of an anti-conspiracy.

Right from the beginning, there has been a very public discussion of the subject from people both inside and outside the defense establishment of multiple countries. For various reasons relation to personal embarrassment and military secrecy, the specific details of some of the best cases were often obscured, but much of this legitimate secrecy has now expired and the data is mostly in the public domain.

The clear pattern that emerges is of a defense establishment that, instead of operating a conspiracy to investigate in secret, did their best to wilfully not acknowledge the topic at all, because it was an embarrassing problem nobody wanted on their desk. Because of this official denial, various private groups (what Jacques Vallee called 'the invisible college') began to organise to try to fill the gap. Military personnel joined these groups because they weren't allowed to discuss the subject in their 'day jobs'.

The people who did the most serious research did most of it in public, and their results are widely available (though boring).  There is a UFO phenomenon; we don't know what it is; we don't know how to engineer it; we do not have any crashed saucers; we might have some physical artifacts but they're not unambiguous; we don't know if the core phenomenon is primarily physical or mental, though it seems to be more of the latter; we don't know if it's intelligent or natural; it does not appear to pose a direct military threat or hazard to navigation; it's weird and annoying but generally it leaves us alone. After decades of planetary and astronomical observations and SETI investigations, the UFO phenomenon doesn't seem to have anything to do with physical extra-terrestrials from space. It's something altogether closer to home, and altogether stranger. Psi is probably the key to understanding it, but we understand even less about psi.

Around this serious core is a haze of pranksters, scientific debunkers and denialists, political propagandists, religious opportunists, and bad actors of various kinds who have poured fear and hoaxes into the pot to make money, to try to manipulate public opinion, to 'startle the real conspiracists out of hiding', to fight or promote what they thought was an alien invasion and/or foreign subversion, or to protect the population from what they thought was a dangerous and transmissible form of madness.

That's basically it. There's not a 'conspiracy' so much as a whole bunch of separate actors all investigating a mystery that nobody has the faintest clue what it's about. And a phenomenon that only appears 'in the field', not in the lab, and really does not like to perform 'on cue', for cameras, and so is very difficult to get a handle on.

At least that's my read of the situation. And in my opinion, the less we bring 'conspiracies' into the mix, the clearer our vision becomes.

Regards, Nate

I have not followed UFO stories since I had a passing interest in the subject more than 20 years ago. I remember at that time I decided that the phenomena can probably be explained, for the most part, in terms of inter-dimensional contact rather than space travel. I've since read that a few prominent thinkers, including Jacques Vallee and Tom Campbell, also prefer that hypothesis.

Since I think that we all experience inter- (or mutli-) dimensional realities, whether via dreams, OBEs or the transition from this life to the next, then the subject surely has a place here. Nevertheless, there is a difference between what I believe is called "Nuts and Bolts" ufology and the more philosophical approach and it is the latter that I would be in favour of including, whether it overlaps with conspiracies or not.