This is important

Truly, metaphysics is a dangerous land squid, with creeping tentacles of meaning. It coils about our assumptions with cephalopod strength, taking each in turn and bending it, crushing it into a new shape of inverterbrate design.

Who decides our meaning? We, who ask the squid for help? Or the squid?

(For a more concrete example, didja notice that in most "cyberspace" stories, if you die in cyberspace you die in real life as well? Even though this is sorta like if you said, "if you see yourself die on TV you'll really die too", it's still a convention of many stories.

I blame Neuromancer for starting this little problem.)

Maybe the reason why science makes the pseudos cry foul is because even a simple study of neurological function is seen as striking at the heart of their beliefs... for if nerves can represent intelligence without the help of any spiritual energy, their fundamental beliefs are shaken to the core.

The psychic believer already believes that all of those crackpot theories are true... tug at one and you tug at them all...
 
BigBlueHead,
Well although on another thread your spouting non-sense, you almost make sense.
The factor of peoples understandings crashing down around them based upon one alteration of their logic (because something occurs to prove something previously wrong) has been with us for many years.

Take for instance Galileo being condemned to Heresy by the Catholic Church, that only in the past couple of decades have absolved him for their wrong.

However this to gives reasons to many other factors, for instance if life outside our planet was spotted can you guess the shear consequences based upon it?
In one corner you'd have the skeptics saying it was a hoax, and even generating the elaborate reasons of how it was, in another corner you would have people accepting it, in yet another you'd have people that would take it as the absolute truth and try to do bizarre things, then you have the people that "Cash in" on a "Gag", that would try and generate multiple hoaxes, and there would then be people that just wouldn't care less.

Before you know it, all the countries of the world are on national alert, not because of aliens, but because of the anarchy that's being instated through all these people interacting, this causes governments to realise that sometimes people shouldn't hear the truth because they can't handle it.

However my statement there by no means implicates the book 'Neuromancer', to blame such a book for all this would be absurd, there are many other things you could blame like Raelians, Art Bell, MTV, Mork and Mindy.
 
At worst, I was only spouting nonsense on a nonsense thread, "When in Rome" and all that.

At best, I was reciting the trash talk that goes on between Dracula and Richter Belmont in the intro to Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. I had hoped to draw the new member Dracula into a dialogue of horror, but it seems he didn't bite.

As for the shifting of beliefs... every time you learn something and believe it to be true, cracks appear in a few of your other beliefs and they need to be repaired. The more fundamental the thing you learn, the more potentially damaging it is to your current world view. Generally you have two options under this circumstance:
1) Try to reform your beliefs to something that accomodate the new information, or
2) never learn anything.

Most learning is (obviously) a combination of these two solutions.

Descartes addressed this idea in the Method of Doubt that appeared in his Meditations on First Philosophy, to the extent that he believed that by questioning his most fundamental beliefs and discovering which of them could not be proved, he would bring crashing down all of his incorrect assumptions and be left with a more truthful, if much smaller and simpler, description of the world around him. (Sadly he ended up appealing to God, which totally ruined the whole thing.)
 
BTW, I also blame Mork and Mindy, but that goes without saying. Dreamscape too, for that matter.
 
Mystech said:
In general, and this isn’t always the case, but usually, if you have to invent a whole new wild phenomena just to explain another phenomena, you’re probably just fucking nuts. Though I guess the real deciding factor is when neither of them are based on any actual observations.
Click to expand...

So, what your saying is that because it requires the total reevaluation of our general view of reality it doesn't actualy matter if you can actualy prove it's true?

In other words if I could prove to you that it was true it would still not be true because it doesn't fit the standard model?

Forgive me if I have misunderstood, but that just doesn't seem right.
 
Exsto - When you develop a series of theoretical properties for the universe in an attempt to explain the nature of things, you should avoid reasoning of the following nature:
Premise: The world is made of caramel.
Question: So, why doesn't it look like caramel?
Answer: Well, because the caramel elves use their magic to trick us. Reality is an illusion.
Question: How do we know there are caramel elves then?
Answer: Because I was told so by a piece of bacon, and bacon never lies.
Question: Why does bacon never lie?
Answer: Because bacon is the essence of caramel, and caramel is the only truth.

This sort of metaphysics is a total house of cobwebs; every claim is implicitly backed by caramel elf deception, and so the only way to find out if it is true is to ask a piece of bacon. When was the last time bacon answered a question? So we'll never really know...

If you replace caramel with spirit energy, caramel elves with spirits, and bacon with "pure knowledge gained through dreams/meditation", then you get something similar to the world view espoused by many psychic phenomena types - a totally unprovable mess of popular superstition. The appeal to pure knowledge gained through intuition is often a symptom of unprovable theories.
 
I did a little more digging on the Roswell Crash, since there isn't much information released on it. Thats because the Investigating was carried out by the Military and not the FBI.

However I think I've come to a conclusion over what events really happened, but I would need to know 1 thing to give it a real conclusion, and thats the wind direction for that day.

The overall Theory that I've derived is this:

During the Second World War it was no secret that "Los Alamos" housed some of the minds responsible for the creation of the nuclear bomb, One of the very testing areas was "Trinity", as the crow flies Trinity is Due West of Roswell, although the other side of a mountain range.

It is possible that a Balloon carrying geiger meters and even shaved monkeys, was let loose to sail over Trinity, to work out the extent of Radiation coverage 2 or 3 years after a Nuclear test was done there. Afterall they would have seen a number of people (soldiers) suffer from radiation to know by that point to use other methods of testing how harmful it would be.

The balloon would have risen up over the test area, been subjected to radiation (And perhaps had it's passengers testing something that would deflect the radiation), if the wind was in the right direction, the mountains would have generated updraft creating lift to the balloon, and on the other side it would have eventually come down at about Roswell.

Preportions of the US Army would have known about but it would have been secret due to it being data collection over a sensative area. The materials and bodies would have potentially been exposed to radioactivity although anyone that wasn't notified wouldn't have followed proceedures with dealing with them.

As for the whole aspect of why someone mistakeningly thought it a spacecraft, well the material that was being tested (an alloy) might have looked odd especially with the shaved monkeys as occupants.
 
BigBlueHead said:
...
If you replace caramel with spirit energy, caramel elves with spirits, and bacon with "pure knowledge gained through dreams/meditation", then you get something similar to the world view espoused by many psychic phenomena types - a totally unprovable mess of popular superstition. The appeal to pure knowledge gained through intuition is often a symptom of unprovable theories.
Click to expand...

How about I base it on this:

Premise: I experience reality.
Question: ...
Answer: yes.
 
As the wool over peoples eyes gets too heavy it will fall off of its own accord.

Discovery of corruption of common knowledge is the key to finding what’s behind closed doors.
 
craterchains, how do you figure the 'wool' will fall of it's own accord?

Do you supposed the fallacy will prove itself as false?

I think this is too optimistic to think, that 'all will be revealed soon' is not a holdable arguement.
Each one of us must seek to pull away the wool from our own eyes, if we simply wait for the truth to come to us we will never find it but instead we will just see the same things, over and over again.
 
I think I said QUOTE;
As the wool over peoples eyes gets too heavy.

Yep that is what I said, or another way of putting it, Those that watch things happen, those that make things happen, and those that wonder what happend?

If this was so important, why hasnt Ellimist kept up?
 
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