Weird Stuff (tinfoil hat wearing goons only, please) - The Bear and Badger

Wookienopants

I'm aware that makes me seem incredibly hypocritical but I have to be honest, I was utterly convinced by this one visit.

I don't expect you guys to believe me and I know I'm about to face a barrage of criticism but I have to offer my two cents.

mk64

I suspect she's better on google than you think.

Wookienopants

This was 16 years ago. I very much doubt it

Roujin

I think there is plenty of stuff about the world that we don't know about, and there might be ghosts and stuff, or people might actually have some psychic ability, or maybe the things we think we are perceiving are something else, like shit, maybe we invented time travel at some point in the future, and all the ghosts and stuff are the people from the future milling around watching stuff in the past.

But people taking money so that they can pass on messages from the dead to grieving relatives, naaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh not on my watch, even if you've actually got real psychic powers go and get your money some other way.

poprock

Wookienopants wrote:

This was 16 years ago. I very much doubt it

Altavista, then.

mk64

she was probably better at searching your myspce better than you think

) r looking up the floor plans of your house.

These people have no limits to what they would sink to in order to try to look convincing.

Watching some of this now in teh program and it's cringe

Wookienopants

I get that chaps and yea, its cringe on the most part but based on my own experiences I can't discount that there might be people with actual ability to do this.

I do believe in the existence of spirits again, based upon what i've witnessed, so this coupled with my visit to what I believe was a genuine medium means I must accept that I am open to the fact that there might be some genuine cases for this.

And I actually hate myself for saying that lol

Kow

Fuck mediums yeah, but my sister went to one and she told her she was speaking to our dead grandmother, who was asking about a particular piece of jewellery she had given to my sister. It was an odd piece, a type of old medal. She even drew a picture of it. I have no idea how she managed that.

Wookienopants

I just think that as much as we want to explain away every single part of our reality I find that its also incredibly arrogant to believe that we know everything. I can't discount the existence of a life beyond death.

GurtTractor

Something I've thought about is that I think you can broadly define two kinds of people in this world; those that believe that miracles cannot happen, and those that believe they can.

And I would specify that by miracle I mean something that happens which is not just currently unexplainable under our current understanding of physical laws, but something which can never be explained by science. So gods/spirits or their acts would be a good example.

Why I think this is important is that those that do believe they can happen will be more likely to attribute an experience as being something supernatural, instead of something that they either just cannot fully explain yet, or that is a result of their mind and perceptual systems playing tricks on them.

I'm very much in the camp of not believing in miracles. I can't say that I've ever had a particularly vivid experience that I couldn't explain yet however, so I have yet to be able to test this out on myself.

It sows a seed of doubt in me about what people are saying if they say they believe in God or similar for this reason, like with David Fravor, the fighter pilot who saw the 'tic-tac' UFO. He said something that stuck with me - "..I do believe in God, I've just seen too many things in the world that I can't explain.."

Dinostar77

I believe you wookie. There are many cultures who beliefs entertain the idea that the dead speak to us. We have no idea what happens to our consciousness or "soul" when we die. Many religions believe in a afterlife. Why couldnt a medium be a conduit to that world albeit temporarily?

My point being we dont know, we may never know. However as it happen to you in this universe then there are rules that govern this universe. We dont know them all, or even the questions to ask to discover the rules. However one day we might have a scientific explanation for what you experienced.

The USA and USSR spent a truckload of money on PSI research in the 1980s £20mil. Remote Viewing aka clairvoyance was used extensively by those two nations to spy on each other. Officially the program was terminated. But those who took part orginally or became students of the original remote viewers have said in interviews that they got accurate results alot of the time. Ingo Swann, Joe McMoneagle, Pat Price, Lyn Buncanan all did work for USA and all swear their results produced actionable evidence.

Who knows, the point being that people can poo poo Remote Viewing, but maybe science one day will have an answer. We just need a new Einstein to tie General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics and produce a theory of everything / quantum gravity. Which as its former name suggests would be able to explain anything and everything in our universe from the viewpoint of physics. Which in turn means it would be able to scientifically explain what you experienced.

monkey

At half four on Sunday, I remembered to FaceTime my mum. It’s usually around that time but never on the dot. Just as the thought flashed into my mind, my girlfriend remembered and said ‘oh we’ve forgot to ring your mum.’ Straight after she’d said it, my Mum rang.

GurtTractor

In terms of things like an afterlife, it's not that I disbelieve that such a thing exists, it's more that I have no reason to believe that it could exist. I have much more reason to think that people think it exists because they build a strong story of such a thing within their consciousness, and have it reinforced by their surrounding culture.

Wookienopants

GurtTractor wrote:

In terms of things like an afterlife, it's not that I disbelieve that such a thing exists, it's more that I have no reason to believe that it could exist. I have much more reason to think that people think it exists because they build a strong story of such a thing within their consciousness, and have it reinforced by their surrounding culture.

And in lots of ways that makes perfect logical sense and I agree with you. Had I not seen what I've seen I'd also have shared this exact view and had no reason to believe in any of this. Like I have stated prior, I cannot explain what I have seen and believe me, I've tried. I'm such a rational scientifically minded person but these instances shook my beliefs up a bit and now although I still believe that 99% of what is deemed "paranormal" is probably bullshit I can't say 100% anymore because of my experiences. I just think there's more to our reality than this.

GurtTractor

Yeah until I have such an experience it's hard for me to say definitively what I would think in such a scenario, but I think I would ascribe it to something not-yet-understood or my mind tricking me, based on what bits and pieces I've learnt so far about how our minds work.

My current rough understanding of our minds is that we recognise patterns and our brain basically continually predicts everything, which feels counter-intuitive when you first hear about it but I think it makes a lot of sense. Lisa Feldman Barret talks about this -

For instance, consider the fourth lesson, You Brain Predicts (Almost) Everything You Do. “Neuroscientists like to say that your day-today experience is a carefully controlled hallucination, constrained by the world and your body but ultimately constructed by your brain,” writes Dr. Barrett, who is a University Distinguished Professor at Northeastern and who has research appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. “It’s an everyday kind of hallucination that creates all of your experiences and guides all your actions. It’s the normal way that your brain gives meaning to the sensory inputs from your body and from the world (called “sense data”), and you’re almost always unaware that it’s happening.”

People tend to feel like we’re reacting to what’s actually happening in the world. But what’s really happening is that your brain is drawing on your deep backlog of experience and memory, constructing what it believes to be your reality, cross-referencing it with incoming sense data from your heart, lungs, metabolism, immune system, as well as the surrounding world, and adjusting as needed. In other words, in a process that even Dr. Barrett admits “defies common sense,” you’re almost always acting on the predictions that your brain is making about what’s going to happen next, not reacting to experience as it unfolds. (Michael Pollan details the same neurological process in his book How to Change Your Mind.)

“Predictions transform flashes of light into the objects you see. They turn changes in air pressure into recognisable sounds, and traces of chemicals into smells and tastes. Predictions let you read the squiggles on this page and understand them as letters and words and ideas,” Barrett writes. “They’re also the reason why it feels unsatisfying when a sentence is missing its final.”

https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/lifestyle/article/how-your-brain-works

I think this is relevant because when you have a predisposition to believe in the supernatural, it means that in situations where you are presented with a phenomena that doesn't fit into any current understanding, your mind will tend to rapidly build or predict an explanation for it. Like how we often see faces in things, we've built up an understanding and a pattern for what a thing looks like and when we see something that happens to match that pattern we can't help but see it as a face.

Dinostar77

I do like this quote and have used it before, but i think its really good. It was in Reference to the Show Secrets of Skinwalker Ranch, but its applies to the term "paranormal" generally. Btw his credentials are impeccable. Go Google him.

Quote by the lead scientist Travis Taylor, who hates the word "paranormal".

"..I don’t like the word paranormal. I don’t like it at all because it suggests that if we see something in the universe and it exists within the universe that it’s not supposed to be in the universe. And what I saw was within our universe so to me I’d say it’s normal. I’d say [it's] something that we just don’t understand and don’t know what it is.

Now what I will tell you is that absolutely without a doubt we have scientific instruments that detected and measured, multiple witnesses see, multiple cameras and multiple occasions, phenomena that cannot be explained by human technology.

It doesn’t mean it can’t be explained by a better or future understanding of physics but it does mean we can’t explain it with human technology."

mk64

wookie, I wonder if it's not just the medium doing the darren brown horse racing trick.

nick_md

I'm a sceptic but will always keep a tiny corner of my mind open to most things, why wouldn't you? Makes life more fun I reckon. I've never had any experiences that I'd call supernatural or anything (apart from that time I went +70 in a game of Halo2) but I've heard stories from enough folk who aren't nutters and swear they once saw xyz that I just think, keep a tiny sliver available.

Kow

I recommend reading Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks to see just how much your mind can play tricks on you and how much you can't trust your own eyes. Small misfirings in your brain, and anyone can have them, can lead to profound experiences that you would swear blind are true.

It's always good to be open minded but you need to exhaust all rational possibilities before even considering accepting paranormal things.

GurtTractor

Which is darker, A or B?

764px-Grey_square_optical_illusion.svg.png

Kow

nick_md

They're both the same ofc.

nick_md

Kow wrote:

It's always good to be open minded but you need to exhaust all rational possibilities before even considering accepting paranormal things.

Deffo, that's the position I take.

nick_md

I love me a good haunted pub story, some pub built in fuck knows how long ago where someone died or something, and ever since there's a cold chill in one of the guestrooms, or footsteps in the cellar when nobody's down there, that kinda stuff.

nick_md

GurtTractor

That illusion seems to work better if it's smaller actually -

kIyW5n8.png?1

Spoiler:

Wookienopants

I haven't got the time to sit through that at work but I'll watch later.
I love Derren Brown, his stuff is incredible.

GurtTractor

I saw this a while ago, and I highly recommend it to all you tin foilers. I think you'll enjoy it, I did despite not getting too much from it other than 'maybe don't go out into the woods alone in America'. Basically it's about a number of cases where hunters have inexplicably gone missing without a trace, in various parts of the US - Missing 411: The Hunted

It has a bit in it that I found especially creepy and fascinating, particularly as I'm interested in audio. I'd watch it within the film first if you have interest, but yeah this would shit you right up if you heard this out in the woods -

Spoiler:

Enjoyably creepy BS.

Diluted Dante

A girl i used to work with had a trick where if you thought of a name, she could get it from reading your face.

I tried to break it by thinking of Teal'c, but she still got a phonetic spelling of it.

I imagine theres some of that going on with mediums.

GurtTractor

It's an amazing skill no doubt, but it's much less cool if it's used duplicitously to profit from people.

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