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23rd October 2015, 08:54 PM | #321 |
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Then no one can absolutely say that my visitation wasn't exactly what it was. It's inappropriate to say that something definitively didn't happen based on conclusions from research, that at best, represent an indirect way of addressing the question, and then say those very same conclusions are up for revision.
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23rd October 2015, 09:02 PM | #322 |
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I don't adhere to any organized religion. You are confusing spiritual belief with religion and those are completely different things. Religion is a man made construct where as spiritual belief is faith that we are not limited by our current surroundings even if we don't completely understand what that might be. This is not just supposition on my part, there is empirical evidence to suggest that I'm correct about a multidimentional universe. The only thing up for debate here is if I correctly interpreted what I think I experienced. If you have the time, let me link a show for you to watch that better explains what I believe.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyH2D4-tzfM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eN24Sv0qS1w |
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23rd October 2015, 09:22 PM | #323 |
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Both are made up and presumptively foisted as "truth." Dressing up subjective belief to look like science doesn't separate it from religion.
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23rd October 2015, 09:25 PM | #324 |
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24th October 2015, 02:01 AM | #325 |
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Just to add to the ever-reliable JayUtah's well worded and pertinent points, there is still no justification for saying it actually was your mother, in some form or other, that visited you. If you think it was, you really need to explain how you think this works. This is another huge difference between your spiritual beliefs and science. Scientists put forward testable, repeatable propositions that others can replicate. You, on the other hand, content yourself with saying "It did SO happen! You can't prove it didn't!" This, while it may be very comforting for you, is of no use to anyone else. If these things are real, how are the rest of us supposed to experience them? What comfort or benefit does the rest of the world get from your supposed ability to interact with your deceased loved ones, an ability that you cannot (or will not) help us to develop? If you won't suggest a mechanism (beyond "there was this cool film I saw once"), or any means of verifying what you claimed happened, and resist the very idea of so doing, then what you have is essentially useless.
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24th October 2015, 02:02 AM | #326 |
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Originally Posted by Jodie;10944430 If you have the time, let me link a show for you to watch that better explains what I believe.
[URL="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyH2D4-tzfM" |
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24th October 2015, 03:24 AM | #327 |
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One is a Channel 4 doc by astrophysicist and former President of the Royal SocietyMartin_ReesWP, the other is a random assortment of made-up gibberish about travelling in the fifth dimension.
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24th October 2015, 07:05 AM | #328 |
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24th October 2015, 08:10 AM | #329 |
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Sure it does if there is empirical evidence to suggest that we are metaphorically chained and living in a cave where we can't turn our heads to see the source of the shadows.
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24th October 2015, 08:21 AM | #330 |
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The higher dimensions in mathematics are in no way similar to the concept of fifth dimensional travel as described by your second youtube link.
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24th October 2015, 08:30 AM | #331 |
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For one thing, I don't think it's my ability. If my mother chose to reach out then the intent was her's, not mine, since I was unaware of any problems my siblings might encounter later in life. The visit was disturbing, rather than comforting, considering what she said would happen. I've tried to do as she asked but there was nothing that I could really do to alter the future if my siblings were unable to identify what series of choices they would make that would result in the inevitable. Without prescience here, it's useless to know what the future holds if you don't have the proverbial GPS co-ordinates to get there.
I don't have any explanation for my visitation other than our consciousness must exist in some form, or either there is some form of consciousness that observes us, that can see the totality of time rather than the "freeze frame" horizontal way that we process our existence. There is empirical evidence that indicates that these dimensions do exist,and can work that way. However, there is nothing that indicates there is some form of consciousness inhabiting these dimensions, whether that is something individual or an extension of our own consciousness. At best, it provides circumstantial evidence that our perception of reality is limited. If I had to guess I would say that our consciousness would exist in all dimensions simultaneously. If the perception of the 5th dimension is everything at once then physical birth and death would have no meaning there. What isn't clear to me is how one could perceive that part of yourself while focusing on the here and now in 4th dimensional time. If there is a way to train this perception, similar to a blind person learning to see, my guess is it must have something to do with the levels of consciousness that we have here such as the superego, ego, and id. |
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24th October 2015, 09:39 AM | #332 |
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No, that's just the incompleteness argument cast in different words. You're making specific affirmative claims and pretending you've made them rational by appealing to vague ambiguity and insinuating that your proof must live in it. It's pure handwaving.
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24th October 2015, 09:57 AM | #333 |
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Agreed. Simply put, religion is normative. Science is at worst descriptive and at best predictive. Affirming a cause for an observation simply because it's been part of our mythology for millennia, and because it's too poorly formulated to be tested, is simply normative. There is no difference between saying "I saw the ghost of my mother" and "Jesus is your Lord and Savior." Vague protests that there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in our philosophies do little. And yes, the normative aspect is important when people make decisions about how to treat others based on these norms: "Jesus is your Lord and Savior, so I'm going to imprison you until you agree to obey his laws," or "I saw the ghost of my mother and it told me to quit my job and live on the streets."
Science lets us reason reliably about the world around us. Propositions in science let us cure diseases, lead safer lives, reach our potential. Esoteric predictive laws allow GPS to work. There is much yet to be discovered, described, and tested. That doesn't mean we can cram everything and the kitchen sink into that gulf. There is still a qualitative difference between imagination and fact, even if the facts in question are yet unknown. That's why you can't rationally just imagine something and say that because it purports to derive from the unknown, it's beyond rational criticism. |
24th October 2015, 11:04 AM | #334 |
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That video about the '5th dimension' is a speculative and rather confused mix of ideas about spatial dimensions, String Theory, Everettian Many Worlds, etc., but there's nothing in it to justify the idea of some place from which other entities can communicate with us.
It's not the Twilight Zone or some comic book 'alternate dimension' - that part appears to be Jodie's concoction, a mix of Marvel Comic fantasy and lack of understanding of the science mentioned in the video. That same science tells us that not only can there be no communication between the 'Many World' universes, but that consciousness, or any structured remnant of an individual, being processes, or maintained by processes, of the living body, cannot persist beyond death without some comic-book futuristic technology to supply the complex active substrate to copy, support, and maintain it (although, arguably, we're working on it). I've dreamed about deceased relatives and friends, and I've found such dreams can be vivid and either comforting or disturbing, but they're just dreams, constructed from memory and imagination. Dreaming of a deceased relative and invoking fantasy pseudoscience to bolster the wishful thinking that this was a real communication from a dead person, is about as absurd as excusing writing off a borrowed car by claiming someone from the planet Zog suspended Newton's Laws of Motion just to see you crash - then justifying the claim by saying Newton's Laws are known to be just an approximation, and we've discovered lots of planets, so who's to say there isn't an inhabited planet Zog where malicious individuals can do magic? You can't prove there isn't can you? E.T.A. On the other hand, perhaps it's just rather sad... |
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24th October 2015, 02:58 PM | #335 |
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It was only a memory of your mother, instigated by your desire to take care of unfinished business.
Nothing more. You've been too argumentative with your mother in the past, you can not fix it anymore, other than accept what has been, learn from it and use it to improve yourself. That's the only way your desire to take care of unfinished business with your arguments with your mother while she was alive, can have any positive meaning. |
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24th October 2015, 03:00 PM | #336 |
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24th October 2015, 05:50 PM | #337 |
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24th October 2015, 06:03 PM | #338 |
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I don't know that other entities would be there, that's simply my idea. Actually , I don't think it's "other entities" but an extension of our own consciousness/existence/being or whatever tag you'ld like to use to describe yourself.
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24th October 2015, 06:12 PM | #339 |
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24th October 2015, 07:05 PM | #340 |
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I don't have a problem with rational criticism. To me, it isn't rational saying something isn't possible even when there is empirical evidence to suggest that we live in a much richer universe than we can observe. Am I right or wrong about how we exist or if my mother truly tried to warn me about something in the future? I have no idea, but neither does anyone else.
I might not completely understand the concept of reality as described by the multiverse theory but I believe I'm on the right track. I'm not the only one. http://www.robertlanza.com/do-we-hav...ntific-answer/ Hans Peter Durr was another one who gave credence to the existence of a soul independent of mind. http://www.nuclear-free-future.com/e...ker-physicist/ |
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24th October 2015, 07:50 PM | #341 |
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24th October 2015, 07:54 PM | #342 |
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Convince me that you are.
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24th October 2015, 08:10 PM | #343 |
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24th October 2015, 08:35 PM | #344 |
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If Durr concluded something from physical laws that we know about then it is his hypothesis, a hypothesis grounded in empirical data. Therefore it is a hypothetical argument that does have merit since neither side of the debate regarding whether a soul exists is falsifiable at this time. The existence of other dimensions doesn't fall into the woo category, it's based on mathematics. Neither does the disembodied "I" that makes you who you are depending on what research results you accept. To say these hypotheses/concepts are woo based is inaccurate.
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/1...id-but-quantum |
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25th October 2015, 12:58 AM | #345 |
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25th October 2015, 01:51 AM | #346 |
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25th October 2015, 02:02 AM | #347 |
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25th October 2015, 04:41 AM | #348 |
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25th October 2015, 04:48 AM | #349 |
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25th October 2015, 04:49 AM | #350 |
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25th October 2015, 04:51 AM | #351 |
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If you understood the science you wouldn't make such leaps of fantasy. If you want to base your speculations on extrapolations of known science, fine; but this means not making speculative leaps that contradict that science.
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I don't know what your dream prediction involved, so I can't assess which seems the more likely explanation, but on past performance here, I suspect the latter.
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25th October 2015, 05:07 AM | #352 |
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The first link is pure quantum woo. Quantum mechanics provides no support whatsoever for the idea of a soul. Robert Lanza is a woo merchant.
The second link doesn't even mention a soul. Professor Dürr seems to have had a rather new-agey outlook, and what he says about his death (at the end of the article), "When I die, I have no more consciousness, but all that I have thought has been added to the background. As information it has mixed with the world mind, has influenced the whole and become part of it", is a rather romantic view, but not unreasonable if you take 'world mind' as a metaphor. It's quite a stretch to suggest it means he thought he had a soul. |
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25th October 2015, 05:16 AM | #353 |
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25th October 2015, 05:27 AM | #354 |
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It's the Deepak Chopra Theorem.
Woo Slinger's love quantum mechanics because no matter how well explained to them it is all they can hear is "Hey this part of science says weird and/or unlikely events can happen, therefore I can say any weird and/or unlikely event is quantum mechanics!" |
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25th October 2015, 08:36 AM | #355 |
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No. He speculated something. That's a hypothesis. A hypothesis becomes a theory (i.e., a useful thing) when it is tested empirically and shown by that means to be the best predictor. None of that happened. But thanks for confirming you really don't know at all how science works.
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25th October 2015, 11:00 AM | #356 |
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If anybody cares, this thread is a prime example of why I don't waste time investigating ghosts or the paranormal any more.
In my experience, people who've seen a ghost fall into one of two categories: 1. I saw something weird that freaked me out. Don't know what it was, don't want to see it again. 2. I saw something weird that confirms my personal beliefs about the afterlife, and I will ignore all evidence to the contrary. The second group is larger than the first. There is no point in talking to them, they feed off of each other's delusions - and that is really what they are. The first group is open to rational explanations, and most of the time the thing(s) they saw can be explained, and they're happy to be a little wiser about how their 5 senses work in conjunction with the world outside. Since the OP was about floor boards I'll share with you guys a strange incident I experienced this week at work. A guest came to the front desk asking to be moved to a different room due to a strange noise. I went to his room and heard what sounded like an electrical conduit on the verge of overload - a nasty hum. From where I stood it seemed to come from behind the bed, so I went to pull it away from the wall, but when I moved the sound shifted to the opposite wall. I go over there and the sound concentrated on the first wall behind the bed again. I moved the guest out of the room so I could investigate (thinking I had an electrical problem). I was unable to pinpoint the sound's origin. When I went outside I noticed that a man was putting air in his tires at the gas station about 30 meters away. That was the source of the hum. Perfect atmospherics, low traffic flow, and an unobstructed fetch from the pump to the air conditioner intake grill of the effected room. When the air pump shut down I returned to the room and all was quiet. Case solved. Sound is weird. I think before ghost hunters and paranormal investigators can start talking about other dimensions they should learn more about this one because it's amazing to me. Thanks for letting me rant. |
25th October 2015, 06:20 PM | #357 |
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No, I'm simply trying to figure out how it might be possible. There are a lot "if's" and "maybe's" before I could state that it was true such as:
1. If the mathematics is correct and other dimensions exist. 2. If they exist, would they function the way we think they would. 3. If these other dimensions do function the way we anticipate how does that affect our existence. 4. Does our consciousness reside in these other dimensions? 5. Is our conscious simply a function of the brain or does the brain exist because our consciousness needs a lens to focus on 4th dimensional reality? I choose to believe that we exist in all dimensions at the same time and that our brain provides the focus to process our existence here on Earth. I also choose to believe that physical life and death have little meaning in the grand scheme of things, it's more of a type of phase of existence. Seeing ghosts is definitely all in our heads because without our brain, assuming the person actually experienced something, the "ghost" couldn't manifest without the person being there to observe it's presence IMO. Belief that such things exist would probably have to play a part in ghost sightings because you probably wouldn't see the manifestation without it. Seeing what you want to believe probably determines who you see if these sightings actually happen. So if the prophetic dream wasn't my mother, it was definitely something IMO, simply because what she/he/it said came true, but there wasn't enough information given to avoid the outcome. That plays into the theory of mind and how we understand consciousness from a psychological point of view. You have the superego, the ego, and the id. The id is concrete, it needs to see to believe, which might explain why the placebo effect works for a short while. The person believes that the fake treatment will help, so the body co-operates. Religion probably functions in the same role, to propagate belief so that individual's id will be convinced that there is more to reality than what we see. My guess is that the more we learn about the universe, and our place in it, the less we will need formal religion to cultivate a belief that we are more than just these material bodies relying on the chemical reactions in our brains to make sense of our reality. |
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25th October 2015, 07:23 PM | #358 |
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So you've already given up wondering whether your preferred explanation is the right one. You're simply dumping various concepts and speculation into a nonsensical mulligan stew and pretending that "somehow" it means you get to keep believing what you want to believe, and that "somehow" science shouldn't have any qualm with it. I say again, you have absolutely no idea how science works. By all means believe what you want, but don't pretend it's rational.
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26th October 2015, 01:39 AM | #359 |
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Jodie cooks her woo stew with no heed to complaints about its sickly taint. She knows exactly how it goes down here, and enjoys stinking the place up.
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26th October 2015, 01:49 AM | #360 |
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This has been pointed out before, but I think it's worth saying again.
Your basic assumption is that science is wrong, and that some day it will "catch up" with whichever of your numerous and contradictory beliefs you are espousing today. Every step science has made so far has led more to the realisation that we really are just material bodies relying on electro-chemical reactions in our brains. Consciousness has been shown to be an emergent property of brains. There is no consciousness outside of our brains. The more we discover, the more evidence we have for this. If what you are saying is true, this would involve throwing out every single one of these steps- steps which have been thoroughly tested and validated. How could this possibly happen? You have this apparently unshakeable belief that science is wrong, and your speculative beliefs are right and will one day be validated by science. Given that this is highly unlikely, have you considered revising your assumptions? Do you not think that is is just faintly possible that what you saw was just a dream? |
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