Paranormal stuff you believe - Page 5

Sounds a lot like one of the things Michael Shermer talked about in his TED lecture. In that case, it was playing a record backwards twice, once without knowing what you were supposed to hear and then another time after being told what to hear.

I'm not an expert on what people are calling EVP in and of itself, but from what I've read here, I would bet (assuming EVP isn't actually dead people talking) that EVP is simply pattern recognition in the midst of semi-random noise.

Almost every human becomes an expert in at least two things (sensory capacity-wise), and those are face recognition and language understanding. Our mind is SO tuned for these things, that we only need the bare minimum of a signal to recognize something as a face or as language.

This means that we are REALLY good at reocognizing faces, but that our false alarm rate is very high. You can take a face and remove a huge amount of the information in the picture of the face, and people can still tell it is a face. Do the same with some other mundane object, and we are not as good. This is likely why people are always seeing faces (especially iconic faces like Jesus' and Mary's) in things (clouds, bagels, toast, roadkill, etc.).

Much of EVP is likely (at least partially) the same thing but in the auditory domain. The brain is always looking for patterns... given enough random noise fluctations, patterns will arise, and the brain will try its damnedest to interpret them. This is generally advantageous (think of trying to hear someone talking quietly in a noisy room, or just being able to understand the same word spoken by thousands of different people, all with different tones, inflections, speech rates, etc., etc.), but in the case of EVP where it is (theoretically) ALL fairly random noise, the our brain picks up things that it thinks are there, but aren't, and translates them the best it can.

EDIT: Thomas and mcnooj partially beat me to it which their posts while I was typing mine.

All interesting stuff to consider and investigate, guys.

Here's the link to Shermer's lecture for anyone who hasn't already seen it. I'm pretty sure I was linked to it through CHUD. And here I am regifting it back!

Michael Shermer: On Believing Strange Things

Good stuff kungfumonkeyMike.

That's why listening to low quality audio makes you tired/ears hurt. Because your mind is spending too much time piecing together bad data in a recognizable way.

Same thing goes for your eyes, look at enough blurry objects or stare intensely at something long enough and you get eye fatigue.

A chupacabra caught on tape?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqebUluWFM4

That's how bigfoot sneaks up on his prey. He can go "blurry" at will. You squint and strain then fumble for a camera... and just as your rubbing your eyes... BAM! He clubs you over the head and steals your beef jerky.

That's how they should catch him. Jerky bait and a huge box propped with a stick. Maybe one of those piano boxes would do the trick. He'd never notice.

Wow!!! What a great day for cryptozoologists! First, we have the Chupacabra video and now Bigfoot's been discovered in some redneck's freezer!

We talked about it on page 4. The press conference is today!

SEARCHING FOR BIGFOOT:
DNA evidence and photo evidence to be presented at a PRESS CONFERENCE to be held on:
Date: Friday, August 15, 2008
Time: From 12Noon-1:00pm
Place: Cabana Hotel-Palo Alto, 4290 El Camino Real
Palo Alto, California 94306
(A Crown Plaza Resort)

Hoax? Hopefully there will be more info soon.

D'oh! My apologies.

Way late to this thread. I stand with the skeptics on this stuff. However...

My mom's late Uncle Jimmy was a semi-professional psychic for most of his life (he had a day job but did readings and stuff on the side). My mom's most impressive Uncle Jimmy anecdote goes something like this: *Steve is my dad. He had been having odd foot pain for a few days, but had told no one about it. He hadn't seen Jimmy in months, and wasn't home when the phone call happened. My mom told my dad about the call when he got home, and he was pretty freaked out. The pain indeed went away within a couple of days.

I don't know what to make of this story. I lend it more credence because my parents are skeptics themselves and have no reason to make something like this up. I remain skeptical, but it gives me pause.

More Squatch corpse news on CNN.

Friday's news conference was held in Palo Alto, California, near the home of Biscardi. About 100 reporters and onlookers attended the event, in a hotel banquet room, including a man who shouted questions while wearing a gorilla suit.

BFRO claims it's a hoax (link to the press conference vid here as well).

And... IT IS.

Oh well, I wanted to believe. Guess I should have taken some good advice...

TRUST NO ONE.

Ackroyd believes.

In case this was too understated, holy jesus fuck, watch the video. All of it. You need to hear Dan's suggestion for making Crystal Head Vodka even more pure.

I don't care. I want a crystal head bottle.

Quadrupled distilled and filtered thru diamonds! What's a bottle going for? Your firstborn? Maybe the sacraficial blood of infant virgins is part of the process.

$40!

I'll make shitty drinks with the vodka and then re-use the bottle later.

To store the blood of virgins!

More on that hoax: Bigfoot 'Body' Sells for $250,000 on eBay

Hahaha

"The Bigfoot came here on a spaceship" splinter kooks are my favorite.

Even crazies have crazies.

What better way is there for the Reptoids to go undetected than to dress up in Sasquatch suits?

"Our sleek reptilian forms will go completely undetected beneath these Bigfoot suits I procured with the Obtainicon from Halloween Headquarters!"

I just love the idea of an interdimensional bigfoot. Where does the Bigfoot Door go? It goes everywhere and everywhen.

Interdimensional travel is only possible in the confines of an early 21st century shitty Bigfoot suit.

The Terminator series had it wrong.

Wasn't the whole "Bigfoot is an interdimensional being" the basis of a Real Ghostbusters episode?

Haha: iHalloween: Turn your iPod into a Ouija board

Fucking dinosaurs! That is all.

I've been mulling this one over for a while now, and I'm fairly certain that it's possible to alter (and even control or shape) the future just by thinking about it.

When I lived in Montreal, our house was haunted. You could hear footsteps going up the servants stairwell by the kitchen, you could hear the dumbwaiter going up and down, and you could hear the servants call-bell ringing. Yes we lived in a very old house.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_a_Man_Thinketh ?

Or do you mean something different?

I'm not sure. That link seems to have something to do with the bible, so the odds are no.

What I mean is this:

If you're driving down the road and you envision that around the next bend a red convertible will slam into your car, it's less likely to happen than if you had not predicted it. Of all the red convertibles that crash into people in the world, virtually none occur right after the occupant of the smashed car predicted it would happen. By predicting it, you're increasing the number of specific circumstances that would need to occur for that car crash to take place, therefore making it less likely to occur at all

Since the odds are that you won't be accurately predicting or envisioning events before they happen the vast majority of the time, the odds are if you predict negative outcomes all the time the majority of them will not come to pass specifically because you predicted them and since the universe likes to balance itself it wouldn't let you be right about your predictions all the time

It's kind of like being a reverse psychic and I've been using this method to reliably stave off disaster for nearly two years now.

Words escape me.

I am currently visualizing myself being attacked by Dracula riding a pterodactyl while commanding an army of ninja robots.


Working ok so

That just boils down to chance and being a pessimist. If you think bad things are going to happen to you all the time,as you pointed out, it's not very likely the case that they actually do. They could, but they would have happened regardless. Under that logic my waking feeling that an asteroid impact or nuclear war is going to happen today is keeping the world safe.

But, I digress, there are paranormal things that I semi-believe in. Namely being the permanence of some form of consciousness. If my consciousness stopped existing in the future, I shouldn't exist right now. It's like if you permanently lost your memory of all prior events and woke up in a hospital bed, it would seem to you that you had never existed until that moment.

...Something all existential and weird like that, yeah. I'm not banking on it.

This...^^^...is...GENIUS!!!

Fair enough and while I can understand your perspective I'm just not sure that you're correct. I think that anticipating/imagining an unlikely outcome (such as an asteroid attack) decreases the likelyhood it will occur. No one can be sure about that, obviously, but all the same it seems to fit in with what I understand about chaos theory ETC (By the way, the longer the time frame the less likely this is to work. If you imagine an asteroid attack will occur sometime in the next billion years, probability is already going to be so stacked towards this happening that your prediction is virtually irrelevant. If you contemplate it occuring in the next 10 minutes? I think on that kind of timeframe it's perhaps possible to shift events away from that outcome a good number of times out of 10)
I'm not so certain about that. I have memories that possibly are of events that occured before 1986, but I'm not sure if they're genetic memories or just imaginings. Regardless, I don't think that my consciousness existed before I was born and I don't have much confidence it will exist after I'm gone.

*Shrugs* Like I mentioned, I'm not banking on it and edging toward the whole oblivion angle.

I wasn't trying to disparage your ideas. Just discuss them from my perspective. Heck, it could be that your soul is immortal and the rest of us just die!

Thank you for feeding my narcissism . I wasn't really trying to discourage your idea either, I just have a bad habit of taking the opposite point-of-view in most discussions.

I like to believe in the idea of ghosts... Hell I'd throw in bigfoot because I don't like to think the Loch Ness Monster lied in his autobiography.

No problem, agreement with my ideas is not compulsory.
I am not certain about ghosts (not saying I don't think they're real. I mean just what I said, I'm just not certain), but I think the early man ancestors surviving in isolated pockets could be possible, same goes for dinosaurs. Not sure about Nessy, but if there was going to be a big foot, it makes sense he'd be American. Our continent was mostly people free until fairly recently, so it seems like big foot could have survived here longer than he would have in asia or europe ETC

By the way, I've been meaning to post about this ever since I saw the movie, but Jude Law's opening monolog about the box and the cat in REPOMAN perfectly sums up my "reverse psychic" idea. The unseen around the next bend, which could either contain a red convertible speeding towards collision or not, is the "cat and the box". By considering the possibility that the next corner could contain the red convertible, you're making the odds of it happening decrease by making the conditions necessary for that car to be there more improbable (that there would need to be a car that you've predicted being there, an unlikely feat)

When I was younger I used to be quite superstitious - to the point where it manifested itself in a mild kind of obsessive compulsion. Lucky scarf for the match, putting my left shoe on before the right etc. From an early age I read endlessly and soon became (and still am) a massive science fiction fan. This kind of loaded the bases for me insofar as the existence of aliens are concerned. I'm not a believer in the commonplace (even among some scientists) argument that there are certain key requirements for life to exist (water, oxygen etc.) I think it's logically unsound and hold that life - of any form - is a product of its environment. To say that life can't exist on Venus because the atmospheric pressure is ninety times that of earth's, the surface temperature is high enough to melt lead, sulphuric acid falls as rain etc. fails to recognise that Venusian life would have adapted to that environment - just as we are adapted to life on Earth. I think we may well discover life - of curious and fascinating forms - on several of the planets and moons in our solar system (especially Mars, Europa, Enceladus, Titan, Ganymede & Callisto). As for the probability of life in the universe, I think that's as close to 1 as you can get.

I was born and raised a Catholic. I went to two Catholic schools and was indoctrinated into the Catholic belief system. Throughout my education I believed in god and the devil, heaven and hell, the crucifixion, the ascension, the sacrament - all that stuff. I attended church in school and also - although less often - away from it. I mean, it was scary stuff and I vividly recall the stony silence in class when our Religious Education teacher informed us that if we were judged sinners we would burn in hell forever.

Like many, the moment I left school and exposed myself to society and culture the first cracks in my belief appeared. There were just too many good arguments which religion couldn't answer. Within a very short space of time science had given us electricity, flight, provided a coherent and consistent theory for the universe and the existence of man, cured smallpox, cholera and tuberculosis, split the atom, cracked the genetic code and put a man on the moon, whilst Christianity - after two thousand years - still couldn't prove the existence of god.

It took many years before I recognised religion as what it is (you can never rid yourself of deep-seated indoctrination. But you can repudiate its power over you) - a corrupt institution that wields superstition as a mechanism for coercion.

Once free of it it didn't take long before I rid myself of the rest of my excess baggage of superstitions. It was truly a liberating experience and I felt like I had somehow evolved as a human being. So now I don't believe in ghosts, fairies, fortune-telling, astrology or an all pervading Force that surrounds us and binds the universe together.

Ironically, when I began training as a high-school teacher my first post was in a Catholic school. As a outsider looking in I was shocked by the sophistication and the cynicism of the ... well ... brainwashing that was taking place. As this was my first position I had to toe the line and keep out of trouble. At times it was very uncomfortable. I was forced to recite the fawning nonsense whilst under observation, or work as an assistant in RE classes that were studying abortion. I felt like I was guilty of child abuse. Thankfully I got out.

So now my money is on science and philosophy. The odds are much better. I don't rule out the possibility of some powerful existence in the universe - but not one that demands slavish worship or be fried to a crisp.

It's amazing how many of us lapsed catholics seem to reach that position in life in my experience Geoff.