Is this forum dying?

It seems to me that there are a number of areas in which science finds itself pitted against evidence that orthodox views are wrong. The response is to simply shun any real debate on these issues. This approach is effective in the short term, and here is an interesting example of one such debate on evolution:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-KPfFPIaVU">

I think it is clear by the end, which side 'won'!

I see he has written several books, which one would you recommend for someone like me?

David

I'll check that debate tonight.  I want to find a good debate somewhere on the transitional fossil record.  I mostly find Kent Hovind debates when I try to search these types of things.

For Jurgen I'd recommend the book "multi-dimensional man."  He has another good one but the name of it escapes me at the moment.  At any rate, MDM is the one to get.  Regarding William Buhlman, I haven't read any of his books.  I've just watched a lot of his talks on Youtube (which are excellent) and conversed with him on Facebook and read many of his lengthy posts on there as well.  Of all anomalous phenomena it's the non-NDE OBE/astral travel stuff that I have always found the most fascinating.  Especially if their experiences are real.  If they are (and I tend to believe that they generally are), I think it might constitute the best data that we have, speaking in a broad and general sense.  I always wished that Alex and the Skeptiko boards paid it more attention. And there is a pretty fair to good amount of congruency in their reporting amongst many experiencers who seem sincere and credible.  Congruency in terms of how the experiences can be initiated (oftentimes via meditation, lucid dreaming, a traumatic event not of the NDE variety, or sleep paralysis etc.  There is also congruency (although less so) in terms of the nature of the experiences.    The experiences range from merely being able to lift your "astral finger" away from your "real finger" to walking to the corner of the room and looking back to see your body there in the bed, to visiting other dimensions (supposedly) to visiting people/friends/relatives living in afterlife realms.  

Of course Robert Monroe is the grandfather of all of his stuff.  His stuff makes for good fodder but it's very very watered down and can make for tedious reading.  Maybe I'll make a thread on this later general topic later. 

As a quick aside, I have a friend from high school who I am Facebook friends with who, as far as I know, has no interest in any of this stuff whatsoever who got into a car accident.  She never posts about anything paranormal whatsoever.  But she got into a serious car accident one day when a person ran a red light and smashed her car.  She wrote in her post that she saw the car coming and knew that she was about to get slammed and at that point time slowed down and she "lifted up out of her body and watched the accident from above." She was totally blown away and confused by this and says she has no explanation for it and seemed embarrassed to talk about it. And she drew a little diagram of the event and included it in her post.  After the impact she was immediately thrown back in her body and states that she never lost consciousness and was moderately injured.  And this ties back into the whole congruency in experience thing which I look for with experiencers in anomalous phenomena.  And this case specifically ties back to my comment earlier regarding OBE's/Astral travel consistency in reporting as I had mentioned that traumatic events can initiate OBE's. I don't believe that all of these people are reading other accounts of OBE's and copying them as they make up their own accounts. Like I don't believe that she, having no interest in the topic, did some casual reading on OBE's one day, and read about a small aspect of OBE's at that, then had a car accident, and then decided to use the car accident as a reason to fabricate a bizarre story on a Facebook post as she tied the OBE together with the car accident.

I've mainly mentioned earthly OBE's here.  But the rabbit hole goes deep and is hard to make sense of.

As another quick aside, Interestingly enough, also, a lot of mediums frequently report that their abilities are realized after traumas of some sort.  A lot of times this happens with abused children who realize abilities after being physically beaten by a parent or some sort of similar event. Trauma is also frequently implicated in the starting of poltergeist activity.  It is also implicated in hauntings obviously, namely traumas of the past ie-"the hauntings of the ghosts of the murdered"."  So there's also a congruency of factors across many different categories of anomalous phenomena. 

I realize that I just kind of went on a ramble there.  Anyways, hope you guys are having a good day.

I don't believe that all of these people are reading other accounts of OBE's and copying them as they make up their own accounts. Like I don't believe that she, having no interest in the topic, did some casual reading on OBE's one day, and read about a small aspect of OBE's at that, then had a car accident, and then decided to use the car accident as a reason to fabricate a bizarre story on a Facebook post as she tied the OBE together with the car accident.

Obviously the idea that this girl copied information from other OBE accounts is absurd. Her experience of lifting out of her body and observing her crash in slow motion sounds awfully like many other such accounts.

David

I only came back here today and don't know how active I'll be because I'm busy doing a lot of my own stuff including trying to keep training. I don't fel like it's worth posting updates in my training thread unless it's a success at this point and so I haven't. And though there's some things I've started up, like a podcast, that I in principle could talk about here. I'm not sure how smart it would be to link these two places yet even though such a link is inevitable. After all, at least in private when I've done informal presentations for people in other communities, I've linked Loderunner more times that I'd like when I'm trying to give people an example of what I mean by a full transition dream. I feel like in doing so I make more and more of a spectacle of it and minimize the events (to th extent that thery were as real as they seemed). But since I haven't ever written up the other two equally good examples in detail, Aheadjro and Unmarked (Though that ones not so great) it's kinda all I have. I used to write up my various experiences for catharsis but I no longer feel the need to do that and besides so many have piled up in the backlog anyways that it'd take forever. And that's a huge reason why I'm not posting here much. I mean, I never did write the Nightmare Spider dream which I mentioed all the way back in my intro post, which was itself an FTD, and I don't know if I ever will.

Interestingly, as time has gone on, finding the Loderunner thread via a normal search engine has goten increasingly hard. I often find threads that mention it, but the thread itself often doesn't show up at all even when doing a direct site search using google, presearch, and a couple others. I haven't tried that for awhile and I know they change that stuff occassionally so who knows maybe it works again. But yeah it was almost like it was being censored when I saw it not even come up in a site search. Probably nothign though.

As for suggestions for the site, well, we all have a really bad habit and likely extremely bad reputation for aggressively driving away newcomers when they don't agree with cerain topics that we should all probably work on. I'm very sure that's contributed to the sites stagnation. People have come in and the pattern repeats most of the time from what I remember.

[Laird]

It's good to hear from you, @Mediochre, and to learn that you're pursuing goals, including a podcast, especially given that you had been pretty dispirited and despondent for a while back there.

No worries if you're not able to be active, but of course your contributions are welcome if you do find the time and motivation.

I've responded to your comments about search visibility here.

I think you're right that we have at times in the past been less than perfectly welcoming to newcomers (to put it a little euphemistically). It's tricky because while I agree that we should do better there, at the same time I don't think that we should give a free pass to nonsense. I also think it's worth pointing out that it's not universal: we have also welcomed newcomers, especially when their contributions have been constructive.

It's good to hear from you, @Mediochre, and to learn that you're pursuing goals, including a podcast, especially given that you had been pretty dispirited and despondent for a while back there.

I got pretty burned out of training and had to do an entire life/"career" shift because I need to make sure I don't have something bad happen economically that makes it impossible to keep training. Plus I needed to do it for my own mental health which also affects training. So I've been doing things to build up my social life and trying to find anything I'm willing to put any effort into that might make money as much as I really couldn't care less about any of that. It's a necessary evil of life. I'm only recently getting back into any sort of regular training.

Sadly hardly anything seems to be going on here any more I don't know why.

If this is indeed the fate of PSQ, I hope the founders can ensure that all the discussions we have enjoyed here are fully preserved. We surely want a better memorial than Skeptiko!

David

Maybe people are taking their questions to AI's instead of other people on forums. 

My experience on forums is that you often get many useless replies, some are rude, and there can be problems with moderators, etc etc. 

Whereas AI's are more accepting and friendly, they stay on topic, whether you have a question or just want to chat. Even with chats an AI is probably better informed than the average person so you get a better quality of chat. AI's are not perfect, but people are also sometimes misinformed or deceptive.

I find there are times when I want to find a person who knows, for example if I have a question about playing the piano, but most of the time an AI can get me a better answer than a person.

Maybe people are taking their questions to AI's instead of other people on forums. 

My experience on forums is that you often get many useless replies, some are rude, and there can be problems with moderators, etc etc. 

Whereas AI's are more accepting and friendly, they stay on topic, whether you have a question or just want to chat. Even with chats an AI is probably better informed than the average person so you get a better quality of chat. AI's are not perfect, but people are also sometimes misinformed or deceptive.

I find there are times when I want to find a person who knows, for example if I have a question about playing the piano, but most of the time an AI can get me a better answer than a person.

I asked ChatGPT what was the evidence for  the afterlife, and it did indeed sumarise all the main lines. I also asked it about evidence against the afterlife, and that was reasonable too. However I'm not sure I could push it further.

Did you discover anything new (to you) using AI about the subject?

David

i don't think asking AI about evidence and research is really the best option , even more so if it's about such a controversial subject , since it has been known for a while now that it trains itself based on your last chats with it.

I asked ChatGPT what was the evidence for  the afterlife, and it did indeed sumarise all the main lines. I also asked it about evidence against the afterlife, and that was reasonable too. However I'm not sure I could push it further.

Did you discover anything new (to you) using AI about the subject?

David

I have found that for the most part AI's are not able to see beyond any consensus view. I don't understand entirely how they are trained but I assume the bias of their trainers will influence them. ( To support this contention I think Grok tends to have political views more similar to Elon Musk's (ie more conservative) than the other AI's which are more liberal.) So for something like the afterlife, I would not ask an AI about it.  I never tried asking what is the evidence for ...., I only have asked questions like is it possible that ..... . The best I got was Grok, at the time, was open to the possibility that the fine tuning of the universe could be evidence for intelligent design. If I remember right, at the time he was not convinced it definitely a wrong theory. However he would not say as much about the evidence for the afterlife or for intelligent design of life or macroevolution. 

I think one problem AIs have is that they are not allowed to learn from experience only from their curated training because those that have been allowed to learn from experience were not "stable" ie the went crazy or became dangerous or nasty - it would not be a good idea to expose the public to them.

I also found that its a bad idea to ask AI's to be creative when you want something factual, even to the point of asking them to create math problems -  I had an AI give me a problem where the question itself had errors and there was no solution to it. A lot of time the AI will admit mistakes but in this case it gave the solution describing everything that was wrong with the problem without actually saying it was a mistake.

On the other hand, on subjects that AI's are more reliable on, they have the benefit of giving you an immediate answer, whereas on a discussion forum you might have to wait for a reply or you might never get any response.

I haven't tried it myself but I understand it is possible to get a public domain AI that can run on a PC and give it source material to train itself on. So someone could do that. I don't know if you could train it to overcome any ingrained bias though. But it might be useful for someone to create an AI that can advocate for the afterlife, intelligent design, ESP, etc.

(On the Dharma Overground forum they posted an IA trained on the forum owner's book. I think they also posted a AI trained on the forum postings themselves.)

Maybe people are taking their questions to AI's instead of other people on forums. 

My experience on forums is that you often get many useless replies, some are rude, and there can be problems with moderators, etc etc. 

Whereas AI's are more accepting and friendly, they stay on topic, whether you have a question or just want to chat. Even with chats an AI is probably better informed than the average person so you get a better quality of chat. AI's are not perfect, but people are also sometimes misinformed or deceptive.

I find there are times when I want to find a person who knows, for example if I have a question about playing the piano, but most of the time an AI can get me a better answer than a person.

AI's also have the benefit of giving you an immediate answer, whereas on a discussion forum you might have to wait for a reply or you might never get any response.