Skepticism and "A message from mom"

As a genuine skeptic I have a similar view...though part of it for me is the philosophical examination suggest[ing] that reality is, at the least, more than [mundane conceptions of] matter.

At the same time, I do wonder how much I would take these cases seriously if it wasn't for my own suggestive experiences. I wouldn't begrudge someone who feels seeing a bird is within their expectation of experience, whereas seeing a ghost is not. OTOH someone who says there just cannot be ghosts and no one should research it, etc is no longer a true skeptic.

I don't think genuine skeptics are a real thing, I think everyone has a bias and the best thing to do is acknowledge and admit to that. At least that way you can catch yourself when you're reasoning because of that bias rather than pure logic, even though it will never be perfect.

I went through some crazy extreme experiences for a long time that never convinced me of their reality. It was purely because of my worldview as well as some self respect/self  esteem issues that made that happen, not logic or evidence. So I know that bias heavily affects it. Ironically those issues would've followed me from my past lives and there's lot's and lots of evidence of that in my childhood. So it's like my past made me believe I didn't and couldn't  have one.

On the topic of research, I think it's of the utmost important that people recognize the sheer geo-political nature of psi as a topic of research. There is probably nothing else in existence that could upset the current structure of society more than psi. And as a result there is an incredibly strong geopolitical motive to demonize psi and make sure no mass population ever has good reason to believe that they can get even small psi effects. Because once you know you can get small effects, the rush is on to get big ones.

According to my past, the tiny effects we see are exactly what you should see, and further progress boils down to layers upon layers of efficiency hacks.

Rulers, in general, do everything they possibly can to ensure no one can topple them, which generally involves tactics that make the population dependent on them. First perceptually, then literally. Psi is the one and only thing that has the ability to truly give people their own independence, especially telekinesis. If the ruling class is aware of such potential you'd expect efforts to be taken to make sure no one ever achieves it. Other than them of course.

And what did we see here? We saw a period between around the 60's and 80's of CIA funded experiments that were eventually talked about and endorsed in the mainstream, and then suddenly a totally blackout, official denial of effectiveness, and demonization of the very idea that any of that could be real. All academic pursuit of it is now career ending, and forget about funding for studies.

Gee it's almost like the CIA funded stuff turned up good results, the powers that be recognized the potential, and then shut the whole thing down to horde it all for themselves, isn't it? "Fit for thee, not for me" strikes again!

When skeptics talk about how psi researchers need to work on methodologies to get better funding and whatnot, they should really be thinking about all of this history first. As well as the many, many other areas that this pattern repeats in. For example ethanol fuels in the early 1900's, the rise of the alopathic paradigm in medicine around the same time,  electric cars in the early 1900's and 2000's, cryptocurrencies today, etc.

I’m much more excited by Kamarling’s step-mum’s encounter with her dead brother than I am with the haunted house and radio. With one of them there’s only the question of ‘do I believe her’ rather than adding the question ‘what’s the cause of the noises and the anomalies with the radio’.

For me they may both be telling true stories, but one of them gets to the heart of things. I hope nobody tries to convince me by knocking on walls and turning my Ipad on and off!

Just show yourself! 

I don't think genuine skeptics are a real thing, I think everyone has a bias and the best thing to do is acknowledge and admit to that. At least that way you can catch yourself when you're reasoning because of that bias rather than pure logic, even though it will never be perfect.

Well a genuine skeptic has to be skeptical of their own conclusions, and their own doubts...really it seems to me that after a bit of training in logic and science a genuine skeptic is just a reasonable, reasonably educated person.

As to Psi's power...I have to admit I go back & forth on that. It seems entirely possible that Psi is largely useless for the majority of the population. That whatever makes it work is too random for most of us to access consistently.

Then again, who knows?

As to Psi's power...I have to admit I go back & forth on that. It seems entirely possible that Psi is largely useless for the majority of the population. That whatever makes it work is too random for most of us to access consistently.

Perhaps here you are thinking of those who openly describe their experiences and worldview in the language of psi.

But what of someone who says something like "I got where I am today by hard work"? That is a description in different terminology, it doesn't acknowledge or mention psi at all. But that doesn't mean the person is not making practical use of it on a daily basis.

So, in all seriousness, I would like to know - for this example - why skeptics (and I'm inviting the skeptics here to answer) would dismiss it? Is it automatic - as in "we know ghosts aren't real so it must be something else" or do you have a solid alternative explanation?  Or do you fall back on the old faithful: anecdote is not evidence? If so, how many such anecdotes would it take to make you wonder? Or is that all that is required to dismiss such phenomena?

I am posting in this section because of Kamarling's invitation, but I will take any discussion of my post to the Related Topics forum.

I tend to treat the story teller as sincere (unless there is something odd, in comparison to all the other stories like these, about it). After that, there isn't much that we can make of the story. We know from research that without documentation* of some sort (examples: diary entries immediately after the events from all involved parties, audio or video recordings from Alexa) to provide feedback and ensure validity, it is unlikely that recall will be able to maintain an accurate record of the events. And even if it were, all we have are a set of sounds whose cause was not formally investigated. It doesn't mean that I would dismiss the story. It just means that the best we can say is "we don't know what happened" and no assumptions can be made about whether it is anomalous or not. A million stories like this just means that we say it a million times.

What is more interesting/important to me is to move forward on this - to find ways to use documentation and formal investigation of events to identify anomalous events (on the way to discovering anomalous effects). We have already discovered that stories which are documented differ from those which are not - not just in terms of the extent to which the events appear anomalous, but in the kinds of anomalies. As Kennedy says, "most research on spontaneous cases is actually investigating the characteristics of wishful thinking." We can't figure out what the characteristics of psi are by listening to the characteristics of wishful thinking.

Linda

*"Documentation" means that a record is made prior to feedback. For example, a subject's pain level is recorded before they are told whether or not the pill they were given was a dummy pill or contained a medicine, interviews of health care workers present during a resuscitation before any mention is made of a subject's recollections of auditory and visual experiences, or video recordings of children's utterances before a suggestion is made that they represent a past life.

As a genuine skeptic I have a similar view...though part of it for me is the philosophical examination suggest[ing] that reality is, at the least, more than [mundane conceptions of] matter.

At the same time, I do wonder how much I would take these cases seriously if it wasn't for my own suggestive experiences. I wouldn't begrudge someone who feels seeing a bird is within their expectation of experience, whereas seeing a ghost is not. OTOH someone who says there just cannot be ghosts and no one should research it, etc is no longer a true skeptic.

That's a humble self acessment and yet everything you wrote in the above reply excludes you from being a true skeptic. I've yet to meet a true skeptic.

Yet, to the point of my question: what is it you think they missed or do you just assume they must have missed something?

Yeah, I'm not sure.  I simply feel too "distant" from the teller and the story itself to find it compelling.  There are so many people who suffer from poor moral compasses and/or are mentally ill.  I have to allow that any distant teller may be in that cohort.  Generally though, as I stated previously, I assume they are earnest and are not trying to manipulate readers of their story.  So what then?  I still don't know what emotional state they were in.  What other circumstances may have potentially impacted their perceptions.  I don't know them.

In the end, for me at least, its "just a story".

Stories I have heard from those closer to me; those with whom I have multi-decade relationships are a different story (no pun intended).  I'm much more inclined to pause and give those thought.  Which segues nicely to:

An example from my own life. My step-mother was not one for indulging in fantasy - a more down to earth, mundane, no-nonsense Yorkshire woman you couldn't find. When I talked about things psychic she would wave it away and change the subject. Yet we did get her to relate one story from her past. During WW2 her brother was in the Army fighting somewhere overseas. One night she woke up to see him standing at the foot of her bed. She was not frightened not shocked but happy to see him standing there in his uniform. He just said something like "I have to go now but I'm ok, don't worry, don't be sad." Two days later they got the dreaded telegram informing them of his death in action.

Now I can force myself into skeptical mode but I know how my step-mother looked at life. I know that she would not invent such a story and how uncomfortable it made her to talk about it. Unless you adhere to absolute denial - it can't happen so it didn't - I cannot explain her vision away in mundane terms. A skeptic can read what I have just written and dismiss it as second-hand with the probably faulty memory of two people involved. That might satisfy the skeptic but not me. I can't dismiss it so easily.

I find that quite interesting Kam.  As Linda points out in her post, there is the difficulty of the massive passage of time from the event to when you first heard it and certainly to today.  Did it happen as she said or has her natural affection for and loss of her brother "enhanced" the story in her perception over the years?
I'm inclined to believe there is likely something there, but it seems the nature of this phenomena to leave us (me at least) wanting.  More evidence, even proof.  Alas, that is likely not forthcoming.

Yet, to the point of my question: what is it you think they missed or do you just assume they must have missed something? 

An example from my own life. My step-mother was not one for indulging in fantasy - a more down to earth, mundane, no-nonsense Yorkshire woman you couldn't find. When I talked about things psychic she would wave it away and change the subject. Yet we did get her to relate one story from her past. During WW2 her brother was in the Army fighting somewhere overseas. One night she woke up to see him standing at the foot of her bed. She was not frightened not shocked but happy to see him standing there in his uniform. He just said something like "I have to go now but I'm ok, don't worry, don't be sad." Two days later they got the dreaded telegram informing them of his death in action.

Now I can force myself into skeptical mode but I know how my step-mother looked at life. I know that she would not invent such a story and how uncomfortable it made her to talk about it. Unless you adhere to absolute denial - it can't happen so it didn't - I cannot explain her vision away in mundane terms. A skeptic can read what I have just written and dismiss it as second-hand with the probably faulty memory of two people involved. That might satisfy the skeptic but not me. I can't dismiss it so easily.

This type of experience was very commonly reported during both wars, Dave. I posted a similar example on here a while ago. In the back streets of towns and cities, where people were in and out of each other houses all the time, reports like these were just exchanged and accepted as normal ordinary occurrences.

It was only with the advance of "modern science" which was kind of like a sanitising 'sweeping brush' in some respects (as regards making such stories taboo) that they disappeared from acceptable conversation. I'm not saying the application of "science" wasn't a necessary step forward, of course it was and it liberated the working class (to some extent) from hardship and drudgery and the overbearing influence and hypocrisy/illogical jurisdiction of the Churches.

But along with all that, certain "truths" were lost, labelled as irrational or consigned to history as superstition. And unfortunately (for some anyway) the truth about anything tends to resist being buried forever. It's kind of ironic that the tremendous steps forward in "science" such as advanced resuscitation techniques developed by a desire to save lives at all costs, have actually been the unwitting tools of giving us our 'souls' back.

I find that quite interesting Kam.  As Linda points out in her post, there is the difficulty of the massive passage of time from the event to when you first heard it and certainly to today.  Did it happen as she said or has her natural affection for and loss of her brother "enhanced" the story in her perception over the years?

I'm inclined to believe there is likely something there, but it seems the nature of this phenomena to leave us (me at least) wanting.  More evidence, even proof.  Alas, that is likely not forthcoming.

I'm inclined to agree with Mediochre on the issue of pervasive bias but extend that into something which is more akin to conditioning. Much as most of us on this forum are what we generally call proponents, few are not doubters at the same time. Of course, there is often good reason to doubt but perhaps the fact that there is a prevailing attitude in learned circles of "stuff and nonsense" with which anyone who has been through the academic mill (and many of us who have only looked in from the outside) must feel pressure to acquiesce. Thus the demands on the teller of the tale, even from a sympathetic listener, have that "extraordinary" aspect which would not apply to the relating of a more mundane recollection.

Thus I think it unreasonable to demand the kind of "documentation" that Linda talks about in her response and I think it unfair to write off an experience that was clearly profound and therefore permanently engrained by claiming the inevitability of unreliable recall. If this were the yardstick in our legal system, hardly a case would be decided. But my initial question was not so formal. I was not looking for a standard for proof, I was asking for a threshold for credibility. In other words, at what point does a skeptic pause to think "isn't it just possible that ..."?

Also from Mediochre, a point I have been banging on about since the day I first joined the Skeptiko forum. It is the William James "White Crow" argument and Mediochre's "one case":

In the hundreds of thousands if not millions of stories like this the chances that every single one of them involves some combination of perceptual error or fraud is staggeringly low. Meaning that, probably, there's at least one case that is accurate to it's description.

This type of experience was very commonly reported during both wars, Dave. I posted a similar example on here a while ago. In the back streets of towns and cities, where people were in and out of each other houses all the time, reports like these were just exchanged and accepted as normal ordinary occurrences.

It was only with the advance of "modern science" which was kind of like a sanitising 'sweeping brush' in some respects (as regards making such stories taboo) that they disappeared from acceptable conversation. I'm not saying the application of "science" wasn't a necessary step forward, of course it was and it liberated the working class (to some extent) from hardship and drudgery and the overbearing influence and hypocrisy/illogical jurisdiction of the Churches.

But along with all that, certain "truths" were lost, labelled as irrational or consigned to history as superstition. And unfortunately (for some anyway) the truth about anything tends to resist being buried forever. It's kind of ironic that the tremendous steps forward in "science" such as advanced resuscitation techniques developed by a desire to save lives at all costs, have actually been the unwitting tools of giving us our 'souls' back.

Yep, Tim - I did mention the Peak in Darien cases earlier in the thread but I take your point about the prevalence during the war years. I guess it stands to reason, with so many family members at mortal risk, that talk of such experiences would increase at those times.

I also agree with you on what you call "sanitising" - the attempt to sweep away such "stuff and nonsense" as I called it in my previous post.