75. Marilynn Hughes, Out of Body Travel Experiment (Podcast)

[Eric Debois]

Originally Posted by hoggworks

So it's a straw man AND a false dichotomy. Nice!

Hm, well, if you think so you are reading things into that I didn't intend to put there. It's not and argument, and it's not against anyone. It's speculation.

[hoggworks]

Originally Posted by Eric Debois

Hm, well, if you think so you are reading things into that I didn't intend to put there. It's not and argument, and it's not against anyone. It's speculation.

I don't think that either of those things require malice on your part. The premise of your speculation is flawed, and even if it weren't, there's a straw man in there.

Why can't it just be that people have thought about these things and come to a different conclusion than you have?

[Eric Debois]

Originally Posted by hoggworks

I don't think that either of those things require malice on your part. The premise of your speculation is flawed, and even if it weren't, there's a straw man in there.

A straw man is when you assign a position to an opponent that you then defeat. I have neither assigned nor defeated.

Why can't it just be that people have thought about these things and come to a different conclusion than you have?

Why can't what just be..? Of course people can come to different conclusions? Talk about straw man!

I wasn't referring to those who have thought about it, but rather to those who don't. The instinctual unthinking dismissal. I am sure there is any number of reasons for it, and maybe, who knows, brain side dominance might be one of them.

[Open Mind]

I have had a couple of readings from mediums that used specific language ...for example one gave a correct unusual surname with a correct unusual street name and the number of people who once lived in a house on that street ... all correct .... I had attended a funeral of a person who lived on that street years earlier........ clearly beyond what 'cold reading' can obtain.

However these types of communication through mediums seems rare today. Perhaps psi has to leak from the unconscious through the subconscious into the conscious and the process is just a difficult one for certain types of information to survive that process.....

Should we really expect discarnates to still speak in declarative earthly language?

Skeptics (perhaps in a more left brained dominant pattern of thinking) probably do want different sort of information from mediums than say someone grieving an emotional loss .... skeptics understandably want specific names, door numbers, street addresses, telephone numbers ....what skeptics want is Declarative Information / Memories ....however this could turn out to be a logical mistake too.

Declarative Memory means expressed through spoken (or written) words/symbols .... examples include language, numbers, mathematical symbols or other languages such as standard musical notation etc. .....

However we do not drive the word 'car' to work ... the laws of nature are not created by actual numbers, mathematic formulae.... nor do musical notations make actual music ...and so on. .... the value of the declarative memory is sharing explicit information with others by explicit shared meaning, symbols are a language.

Now *if* it is true telepathy increases upon brain death (as claimed in some NDEs and by some mediums) declarative memory is not essentially important after brain death ....... the individual mind/personality could survive with just long-term memory, procedural memory and qualia, etc

Note that long-term memory is not stored in language of indirect symbols i.e. not stored by year , alphabetically..... as a classical computer system might do so.

Note that procedural memory e.g. How to ride a bike is not effectively communicated by language of symbols alone and must be experienced to be easily learned

Note that qualia, cannot be defined or understood without experience of the meaning.

Brain damage tends to cause loss of short term and declarative memory ..... much easier than qualia, long-term memory and procedural memory which are more durable ... alternatives to materialism have not been falsified.

Why do we earthlings think our regional languages of earth should be useful in another dimension / afterlife? A common claim in NDEs and by mediums is that other forms of communication such as telepathy increases upon brain death and dependence on spoken languages decreases. If we assume those claimants are correct, the brain must be filtering out telepathy from our earthly consciousness for some evolutionary advantage.

[hoggworks]

Originally Posted by Eric Debois

A straw man is when you assign a position to an opponent that you then defeat. I have neither assigned nor defeated.

Fair enough; you *did* assign, but you're right, you didn't defeat. Point taken.

Why can't what just be..? Of course people can come to different conclusions? Talk about straw man!

I wasn't referring to those who have thought about it, but rather to those who don't. The instinctual unthinking dismissal. I am sure there is any number of reasons for it, and maybe, who knows, brain side dominance might be one of them.

It didn't sound like you were referring just to those who dismiss out of hand, but skeptics; it sounded like you were saying that skeptics dismiss things out of hand.

I'd say a good reason for dismissing such things is a good amount of critical thinking skills, but that's just me.

What you said feels to me like the standard way of reducing the import of an opponent's view. It's hardly unique to you or psi-proponents in general; it's a human trait. We try to mitigate the value of what the other guy is saying so that we don't have to consider it as much. For example, if you suggested that it's "just" a left-brain dominance thing, you're implying that skeptics -- who you say are largely/all left-brained (you implied, to my reading) -- can't help but be automatically dismissive, because it's just the way they are. If that's the case, then they aren't going to be bringing any good arguments to the table, and you don't have to consider what they're saying at all.

Now, you may not be doing this, and if you aren't, I apologize for jumping to such conclusions. There are many people on this forum who routinely use this tactic, so I'm used to seeing it here. (Skeptics are just debunkers is a common one, because if they're only concerned about debunking, then they aren't concerned about understanding, so calling them skeptics is wrong and they're just trying to poke holes in stuff which is meaningless thus psi exists ha ha!)

[hoggworks]

Originally Posted by Open Mind

I have had a couple of readings of mediums that used specific language ...for example one gave a correct unusual surname with an correct unusual street name and the number of people who once lived in a house on that street ... all correct .... I had attended a funeral of a person who lived on that street years earlier........ clearly beyond what 'cold reading' can obtain.

However these types of communication through mediums seems rare today. Perhaps psi is a more emotional bond .... or perhaps psi has to leak from the unconscious through the subconscious into the conscious and the process is just a difficult one for certain types of information to survive that process.....

Should we really expect discarnates to still speak in declarative earthly language?

Skeptics (perhaps in a more left brained dominant pattern of thinking) probably do want different sort of information from mediums than say someone grieving an emotional loss .... skeptics understandably want specific names, door numbers, street addresses, telephone numbers ....what skeptics want is Declarative Information / Memories ....however this could turn out to be a logical mistake too.

Declarative Memory means expressed through spoken (or written) words/symbols .... examples include language, numbers, mathematical symbols or other languages such as standard musical notation etc. .....

However we do not drive the word 'car' to work ... the laws of nature are not created by actual numbers, mathematic formulae.... nor do musical notations make actual music ...and so on. .... the value of the declarative memory is sharing explicit information with others by explicit shared meaning, symbols are a language.

Now *if* it is true telepathy increases upon brain death (as claimed in some NDEs and by some mediums) declarative memory is not essentially important after brain death ....... the individual mind/personality could survive with just long-term memory, procedural memory and qualia, etc

Note that long-term memory is not stored in language of indirect symbols i.e. not stored by year , alphabetically..... as a classical computer system might do so.

Note that procedural memory e.g. How to ride a bike is not effectively communicated by language of symbols alone and must be experienced to be easily learned

Note that qualia, cannot be defined or understood without experience of the meaning.

Brain damage tends to cause loss of short term and declarative memory ..... much easier than qualia, long-term memory and procedural memory which are more durable ... alternatives to materialism have not been falsified.

Why do we earthlings think our regional languages of earth should be useful in another dimension / afterlife? A common claim in NDEs and by mediums is that other forms of communication such as telepathy increases upon brain death and dependence on spoken languages decreases. If we assume those claimants are correct, the brain must be filtering out telepathy from our earthly consciousness for some evolutionary advantage.

This feels a lot like the elaborate explanations required to answer the question of "why does god allow suffering in the world?" Philosophers sit and puzzle over this forever, when the FAR shorter answer is this: "In Jesus' original teachings, he believed that God had left, and that on judgment day he would return and THEN right wrongs in the world. Right now he's off doing something else and not paying attention to us."

Simple, elegant, solves a lot of problems.
(Not that it means Jesus was factually accurate, of course)

To your example, my elegant solution is that it's just a number of tricks of human psychology at work; this is to say that your base presumption, that there IS this communication at work, is flawed, and frankly unnecessary.


But now we're just going in circles, aren't we?

[Open Mind]

Originally Posted by hoggworks

This feels a lot like the elaborate explanations required to answer the question of "why does god allow suffering in the world?"

I am not religious.... I don't think along these lines .... this is very much a western type of question, the eastern religions would perhaps view it as a law of cause and effect called karma ...

Philosophers sit and puzzle over this forever, when the FAR shorter answer is this: "In Jesus' original teachings, he believed that God had left, and that on judgment day he would return and THEN right wrongs in the world. Right now he's off doing something else and not paying attention to us."
Simple, elegant, solves a lot of problems.
(Not that it means Jesus was factually accurate, of course)

- The quality witnesses and documented reports in psychical research are much more traceble than traditional religious claims.
- NDEs are not particularly compatible with the pagan day of judgment concept.

Perhaps humans have been conditioned by religion to think psi and survival are somehow under the ownership of religion

To your example, my elegant solution is that it's just a number of tricks of human psychology at work

I agree psychological explanations are a factor too .... but these type of explanations have been known by researchers for a century ... it is just not enough to explain the lab data or prior field experiments IMHO

; this is to say that your base presumption, that there IS this communication at work, is flawed, and frankly unnecessary.

Many people have experienced evidence to the contrary ... I don't expect you to believe what you have not experienced.

But now we're just going in circles, aren't we?

Until science progresses further and settles these questions ..... yes

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Originally Posted by Eric Debois

I wasn't referring to those who have thought about it, but rather to those who don't. The instinctual unthinking dismissal. I am sure there is any number of reasons for it, and maybe, who knows, brain side dominance might be one of them.

Can you cite an example of someone dismissing a paranormal claim without thinking about it at all?

~~ Paul

[Eric Debois]

Originally Posted by Paul C. Anagnostopoulos

Can you cite an example of someone dismissing a paranormal claim without thinking about it at all?

~~ Paul

My brother and my father do it all the time.

[hoggworks]

Originally Posted by Open Mind

I am not religious.... I don't think along these lines .... this is very much a western type of question, the eastern religions would perhaps view it as a law of cause and effect called karma ...



- The quality witnesses and documented reports in psychical research are much more traceble than traditional religious claims.
- NDEs are not particularly compatible with the pagan day of judgment concept.

Perhaps humans have been conditioned by religion to think psi and survival are somehow under the ownership of religion

I was using religion as an example; the point was that you have in psi like in religion, a question that you can debate the individual merits of, but you don't need to because you can easily question the underpinnings of it. For example, with religion, people debate the philosophical implications of heaven and hell, but if you take a step back and point to the decidedly human origin of the belief systems, you realize that such nuanced questions are irrelevant, because the religions are demonstrably wrong.

To put it another way: we could sit and debate the specific paint to be used in a second floor bedroom of a house, but if there is no house to paint, then the question of colour becomes somewhat moot.

You start with a question, and if you interpret it incorrectly, it seems as though you need to pile ever larger weird explanations on top of it to make it work. For the christ example, in the context of religion Jesus had a different view, but someone along the line modified the belief system in a way that didn't make sense. Someone came later and modified it more, still nonsensically, requiring larger explanations, then came more changes, more explanations, etc.

I agree psychological explanations are a factor too .... but these type of explanations have been known by researchers for a century ... it is just not enough to explain the lab data or prior field experiments IMHO

All of the stuff I've seen is explainable by psychology or misunderstanding of statistics. It gets to the point, for me, that if you strip away all claims as wrong, or probably wrong, you seem to be left with no reason to imagine the claims are right in the first place.

Many people have experienced evidence to the contrary ... I don't expect you to believe what you have not experienced.

That's an extraordinarily limited view. I believe that Jupiter exists, that the Oort cloud exists, that the atom exists ... I believe that Paris exists even though I've never been there.

I actually *have* had the experieces you speak of, Open Mind. I've had readings done, have had those coincidences, have lived in a house many thought was haunted (and even experienced the phenomena characterized as being the ghost). So your dismissal of me in that way holds no water. I get spooked in the darkness, and when I watch a show about ghosts, I can get a bit freaked out, I admit it. I turn a light on. That doesn't mean that I think the ghosts are real; I realize the thought processes that get me to where I'm at, and I understand what's *actually* going on.

Did I ever say that I haven't experienced what you would describe as paranormal phenomena? Or did you just assume that if I had, I'd believe as you do?

One thing I find interesting about my own history of experiencing these things is that I see them far less as I become more confident in myself. As I am less afraid of the world, I see less of these things, and am better able to dismiss them as the psychological phenomena that they are.

Until science progresses further and settles these questions ..... yes

I meant conversationally. I think science already *has* settled these questions, it's just that people are prone to believe in the paranormal (it's the way we're wired), so that plus once you believe, and you invest in the notion of this greater thing in that way, it's hard to let go of it.