Magical Realist
Valued Senior Member
Then post the quote or admit you're lying. And what is this much more you say I claim to be? Support your claims or admit you're lying.
What evidence would work?
- Thread starter Crcata
- Start date
Then post the quote or admit you're lying. And what is this much more you say I claim to be? Support your claims or admit you're lying.
I admit nothing...You have my post, if you don't want to answer, then the inference stands.
Also, I never said "much more" I said "such more" as in "I'm sure you have claimed to be an Investigator into the paranormal and such, more than once"
Or perhaps now you would like to sidetrack from your stupid unsupported claims and castigate me over leaving out a comma.
Magical Realist
Valued Senior Member
So you lied. That's what I thought. I should report your ass but we all know the mods lie and flame more than anybody else. They'd probably give you a gold star.
That's no excuse. Mods/admins are not permitted to injure themselves, nor get the flu, although if you prefer to stay in bed, we'll accept that [tic mode on of course]
As an aside...Funny, actually not so funny, while going to buy some take-away on Saturday night around 1730hrs, I tripped on an uneven tiled path, and went stumbling forward around 2 meters, finally falling hard as hell and directly on my face: smashed my glasses, blackened my right eye and split my lip!
Two young women and a bloke came to my aid and gave me a few tissues to stem the blood flow and were ready to call an ambulance until I put a stop to it and claimed I was OK....sore as hell but OK!
So can someone please direct some sympathy towards me...pretty please?
DaveC426913
Valued Senior Member
Perhaps you were recalling these:
MR does not say he's a professional, nor does he say he was involved in any investigations. He simply says he's observed them, which, without further elaboration could very well mean he's seen every episode of ghost hunters. We don't know.
Ivan Seeking
Registered Senior Member
Therein lies the problem. Whatever so-called paranormal phenomena may be real, assuming any are, they are almost certainly not reproducible on demand. And since no photograph, video, or other data can stand alone as scientific evidence, there is no way to properly test for such claims. So the problem is that science is limited. Even if something is real we may have no way to prove it.
I remember one physicist who objected to the notion of UFOs because nuclear physicists can find extremely rare particles - 1 in a million or a billion events. Surely people can find evidence of UFOs! Of course the obvious problem is that physicists know exactly where to look - in their collider in the area where collisions occur. If we could count on a UFO appearing in a specific location to within a few square inches [not to mention having an on switch], the challenge would be significantly reduced. I wonder how many rare particles physicists would find if they might occur anywhere in the world at any time, and not in their collider. I really couldn't believe that I had to explain the difference!!! It is rather obvious.
The other problem is that the standard for these types of claims are higher than for regular science. Evidence is not enough. It must be extraordinary evidence. Case in point: Astronauts get a few photos of sprites and suddenly they're real! If the standards for evidence of UFOs [the seemingly inexplicable type] were that low, it would be a done deal.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Translation: The standards for evidence of claims we don't want to believe are arbitrary.
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Same to you Bells.
Thanks for that Dave: It was rather a while back in one of his many other rants re what he rants about best and often..........
exchemist
Valued Senior Member
I see what you are getting at, but I don't think the comparison with sprites, for example, is quite fair. These phenomena have been reported and documented by numerous professional pilots and astronauts. I think it is reasonable to assume that astronauts are not in the habit of faking or photoshopping pictures they take in the course of a scientific mission, right? So this is evidence from a credible, professional source.
Whereas there appears to be a whole industry of people hoaxing and doctoring pictures of UFOs - at least if what MR has posted here is at all representative.
I somewhat agree with you about the "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" cliché. It's not an argument I tend to rely on (partly because I can too readily imagine it being intoned, in an irritatingly childish, sing-song manner
). But I do, strongly, believe in the value of distinguishing between corroborated evidence from credible sources and uncorroborated anecdote from people whose reliability and motives are unknown.
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Bells
Staff member
Not to mention that scientists have been able to watch and monitor sprite events happening above storms. Not only that, they were able to film and photograph them as well as they were happening, from ball sprites, to the coloured sprites that have many tendrils sprouting out all over the place.
They have, of course, been photographed from the ISS as well. Not to mention that awesome documentary about the team of international scientists who set out to capture images of lighting sprites from two planes and also from the ISS... The reaction of the scientists in those planes makes this one of my favourite documentaries. A bunch of scientists excitedly screaming SPRITE!!! as they are trying to photograph them from a plane is priceless.
To wit, you are correct, we cannot compare sprites to something like a UFO. We know what type of storms and most importantly, lighting, generates sprites. We know how high they can get. They have been studied and continue to be studied. We know they interact with the ionosphere, for example.
Yazata
Valued Senior Member
Exactly. That's one of the defects inherent in confusing 'scientific method' with epistemology, and trying to make whatever it is that science does the standard for all human knowledge about matters of fact. It will certainly make it more difficult to register the existence of real events whose occurrance is unpredictable and can't be conjured up on demand with an experimental procedure.
It's even worse than that, since the only things that the physicist can 'perceive' with his collider is what the physicist's theory tells him it's possible for the collider's detectors to detect. There's a huge interpretive component to what the physicist does, as raw data (huge sets of numbers or something) is converted into experimental results. So the whole experimental process is heavily dependent on preexisting theory. Arguably quite a bit of circularity sneaks in at that point.
The ability of the physicists' techniques to detect unexpected things is probably going to be rather limited. Science is good at discovering things that it hypothesizes might possibly exist, things that it thinks that it knows how to look for and detect, but not so good at discovering totally unexpected things that don't conform to existing theory at all.
The other day, Plazma posted an interesting news item about 'Planet 9' being captured from another passing star early in the Sun's history. Of course Planet 9 is purely hypothetical and its actual existence has not yet been verified. Its hypothetical mass and orbital parameters were deduced by implication from various oddities in the orbits of various Kuiper belt objects. And this new item is even more speculative, apparently a speculative hypothesis piled upon a speculative hypothesis. But it's science and somebody published it.
Right. I suggested that in an earlier post and was insulted for saying it. Nevertheless, I damnably persist in thinking that it's true.
The problem with so-called 'paranormal' phenomena isn't that there is no evidence for them. There's no end of evidence. The problem is that the skeptics insist (perhaps correctly) that there is no good evidence. So what hurdle must evidence clear in order to qualify as 'good'? I think that in the real world, that's a sliding scale, higher for some things, lower for others, determined in large part by whether or not the questioned phenomenon coheres or fails to cohere with an individual's existing worldview.
If I want to know whether there are scissors in my drawer, I open the drawer and look. That's all the evidence I feel that I need to verify their existence. I'm satisfied, because I expected the scissors to be there and their existence doesn't offend any of my other beliefs. That's how common sense works in real life.
But if the subject is something 'paranormal', eyewitness reports are suddenly no longer sufficient. Photos are suddenly no longer sufficient. Reports from multiple people are no longer sufficient. One wonders what, if anything, would be. The standard has obviously been re-set much higher. I think that the reason this is so is that the "skeptics" don't believe in the existence of whatever it is. Its existence is incoherent with their preexisting mental picture of what the universe is and how it behaves.
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yes-yes. on a side note-- i like your signature.
what about their(professional pilots and astronuats) testimonials that involve alien vehicles or alien data?-- or what about all of the worldly government officials coming-out, stating what they know ?-- why are they not believed on that?
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what about all of the leaked government documents?
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exchemist
Valued Senior Member
I am not aware of any corroborated evidence of this type. If there is some I'd be very interested in reading about it.
it is odd that you are not aware of what the public has been talking about for a decade now-- strange.
anyways, what about all of the leaked government documents?
tip of the iceberg stuff with a simple 3 second type into google--
https://www.google.com/search?q=gon...F-8#q=government+officials+claim+aliens+exist
exchemist
Valued Senior Member
The public talks about a lot of things that turn out to be crap on closer inspection. Spoon-bending, MMR vaccines and autism, homeopathic medicine........etc etc. Can you quote any examples that you consider are reliable and corroborate each other, to the point that they suggest something significant that is not just an artifact or a phenomenon of group psychology?
As I say I am not aware of any, though I admit this is not a subject to which I have devoted a lot of time - for obvious reasons.
exchemist
Valued Senior Member
Did Hawking provide any evidence of the type I am asking about? I don't think so. He was just speculating , wasn't he? We can all do that and it's fun to do, sometimes. But it's not evidence.
As I say, if there is some evidence, I'd be happy to read about it. But I have yet to come across any.