Fantasies

AN: Nope it was a specific mispresentation which was also strawman. Now you're arguments are akin to "that was not a cat we saw climbing the tree. It was an animal!"

You need to lay off the alcohol long enough to study up on this stuff I think.

AN, the people who I know who have had paranormal experiences (and maybe that's all of us if we were willing to admit it) have no control over it. It just happens once in awhile. Which means it can't possibly ever be tested. But that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

A few years ago my wife and I were on a trip out of town. Suddenly in mid-afternoon she became extremely agitated, almost to the point of becoming ill, and had no idea why. We later found out that someone she was very close to had a heart attack and was asking for her at that exact moment, then died. Ever since then when my wife says that a dead person has talked to her, which happens once in awhile, I believe her. But she has no control over it, it just happens now and then. Who knows, maybe with the right kind of training she could learn some control.

I used to think stuff like this was all a bunch of crap. It's one area of my beliefs that has changed with age. There's been too much direct personal evidence to ignore.

I think the problem here is that we are making science into a religion in many ways. The problem is that science never has "answers" per se, it has theories that work until the next theory comes along. Religion has answers. So the point is that a phenomenon like the placebo effect, which is obviously real, can't be reproduced on demand, and therefore as far as scientific study goes, is useless. Imagine if we could reproduce the placebo effect. Painkillers would be obsolete overnight. The other category is things we aren't sure are real because they are ill defined. You talked of ESP, what exactly is the definition? If it is actually mind to mind communication one would expect there should be some way to understand how it is done. What if however it is more along the lines of just being supersensitive to and especially good at reading people? All sorts of odd possibilities that might be tested, but here is the real kicker. If you could really read minds, would you tell anyone? If you could acquire that skill, why on earth would you let people know?

AN, does that mean I have to throw away my tinfoil hat? And here I was just getting used to it. But you've touched on the problem - alot of this stuff isn't reproducable on demand and perhaps never will be. And so a lot of people say it doesn't exist, because you can't test it in a controlled scientific experiment. But to me that points out a weakness of our scientific methodology, not of the phonomenon. Take for example the well-known placebo effect. Medical science dismisses it because it can't be reproduced consistently. But as Depak Chopra frequently points out, the amazing thing isn't that it can't be reproduced with certainty but that it occurs at all. Clearly science is missing something here. I think our worshipping of scientific method blinds us to a lot of what's real in our world.

Correct, I should have written "you attack my post" rather than "you attack my point".

Also, I now see that davids did make a similar post. I guess that is one drawback to not reading his posts.

Just to clarify saying you attacked my main point when you did not would not be a strawman, it would be counterfactual, they are not the same. You were however correct in your 12:01 post that my language was imprecise as to what you attacked, hence my 12:06 post in response, which was apparently made about the same time as your 12:04 post, or at least before I read it.

Ironically, saying I attacked your main line is the strawman here.

I did not attack your main line at all. I corrected your inaccuracy about the date. In fact I posted your main line before you.

A straw man is when your opponent attacks either a different argument or a weaker part of the argument than the main point. My point was that people, at least educated people, were well aware that the earth was a sphere when Columbus set sail. You attack my point because I didn't accurately describe Aristotles lifetime. The exact dates of Aristotle's lifetime have nothing to do with my main point and do not either reinforce or disprove my point. That is a straw man. I now return to my previously scheduled resolution.

AN doesn't even know the definition of a strawman? He better look it up before he gives his talk at "Strippers and Losers 2006" in Memphis. He sure knows how create and knock them down extentively. Since the example at hand is to hard for him to gork, I will simplify a bit:

Not a strawman:

AN: 2+2=5
Me: It may be a typo but actually 2+2=4. It is also possible that AN just isn't good at math. In any case it should easy to know that 2+2 cannot be 5 since the sum of two even number is, of course, even.
AN: Oh yeah, I had memorized addition please forgive.

A strawman would have gone along these lines:

AN: 2+2=4
Me: What are you nuts? 2+2 is not equal to 7! In fact 2+2=2*2, so the number is clearly composite and we all know 7 is a prime.
AN: What the fuck? I did not say 2+2=7.

Get it? If not I would google for books/webpage with titles like "introduction to critical thinking". Good luck, AN! Maybe you should make a New Year's resolution to become a bit more scholarly. And lay off the alcohol too.

Why shouldn't we be able to tune into radio waves, or the thoughts of others for that matter? Radio waves are energy, just like thoughts are energy. I suspect someday that things like mental telepathy will be generally accepted, that we'll stop denying the evidence that we've all seen first hand. How many times have you thought of someone, then the phone rings and it's them?

FONDL, with radio waves the big problem is detecting them. We are basically transparent to radio waves, so a detection mechanism is problematic. In principle there is no reason why telepathy can't exist, it is just that nobody seems to be able to re-produce it on demand or under controlled conditions. I'm sure there are a lot of things that are real that we don't understand or believe are possible that will seem obvious in several hundred years. As far as the tinfoil hats, I was joking and pointing out that there are people who most certainly do believe that we can detect radio waves, but I'd rather see some more study before accepting their conclusions.

Perhaps it was just a typo, or perhaps it was more of AN's quackery, but Aristotle was 384 BC to 322. Aristotle was one of Alexander's tutors so the time frame shouldn't be that hard to remember.

I will take a temporary break from my new years resolution although this could be viewed as a general response. Yes, I got the dates wrong for Aristotle because I went from memory rather than looking it up. Since I'm not a classics scolar when Aristotle lived is not something I have memorized, nor is it information that I use on any kind of regular basis, but it is something I have a general sense of. I went from memory because other than the fact that it was well over 1000 years before Columbus that the earth was known to be a sphere, when Aristotle lived is pretty much irrelevant to my post. The first accurate measurtement of the earth's circumpherence was closer to 200 BC, but again, the exact dates are not that important and are not the point of my post. If you want an example of a strawman, davids just provided it.

CG, hate to destroy the story, but people knew the earth was a sphere from about the time of Aristotle (200 BC), and it's circumpherence was accurately measured shortly after that. The reason everyone thought Columbus was insane was that either by design or through ignorance he claimed the circumference of the earth was about half the accepted value, and that therefore he could cross the atlantic to get to China. Most educated people (it was only the educated who understood the earth was a sphere) thought he would starve in the crossing. Luckily he ran into a rather large land mass. Columbus refused to accept that he had in fact not reached china, but had discovered a new continent long after it wass very apparent to everyone. As for why people can detect radio waves, I can't see why not... just make sure your tinfoil hat is of the right design.

Chandler - Nice "Repo Man" reference! good to see someone with a sense of humor on this board.

Speaking of fantasy, one fantasy is that it was Columbus who first claimed that the earth was not flat. In fact the ancient greeks had discovered this and had a pretty good estimate on it's size too. (In fact they also had an estimate on the earth's distance from the sun and they knew the earth revolved around the sun.) The fact that the earth was not flat was also accepted by the clergy around Columbus's time. Let's not propogate too much misinformation here, folks.

I've been somehow in tune with a song that was coming in over the radio without the radio on and then turned it on and it was playing. I wouldn't be surprised at all if one day scientists discover that humans can somehow tune in to radio waves. Sounds a bit far fetched now I know but so was Columbus when he suggested the Earth was not flat and he was going to find a new trade route by sailing west farther than anyone else had.

I believe I have a pretty good imagination and start fantasizing or imagining a good story when I'm bored. Well, I may do it just for fun on a few occasions. I've heard suggestions that I should write my stories down since they seem to be much more original than all of the old stuff on tv nowadays. Maybe that's why some dancers like talking to me so much, I talk a lot more freely after drinking a bit and can go into some wild and entertaining stories.

Shadowcat, when you're making decisions rapidly and often, there has to be some intuition involved, and a machine will never have that, at least not in our lifetimes. None of us are even aware of all the factors that go into our decision making. Logic is only part of it. In fact the older I get the less important I think logic is.

Suppose you're thinking about a plate of shrimp and suddenly you hear somebody say "plate" or "shrimp" or "plate of shrimp". Coincidence?

Doverman: Work without an element of play and fantasy is better left to machines. I wouldn't want Shadowcat to base his decisions about a flight I'm taking on a fairy tale, but I would want him to consider factors that only a human imagination can appreciate. And I would hope anyone in his position is inspired to excel by something beyond the cut and dry.

Just to give one tiny example of what I mean, I think most of us would question whether or not clairvoyance exists, and yet I'll bet that most of us have also had a clairvoyant experience. Have you ever had the experience where a tune is running through your head, you turn on the car radio, and not only is that tune playing but it comes in at the exact point of the song that's in your head in the exact same key. That has probably happened to me more than 100 times in my life. Fantasy or reality?

90% of the time I don't hate my job, in fact I like what I do. It's that damn 10% of the time that unfortunately overshadows the fun times.

Work IS reality, which is why I don't think there's any fantasy to it... whether you like what you do or not.

FONDL, you're asking a different question, but the obstacle with mine was that everyone seemed to define the term in a very narrow, Penthouse Forum way. Now you're hoping to broaden it.

Philosophers have been asking from the beginning how anyone can know whether physical reality exists outside your own mind. At last, this board will now put the issue to rest. Not.

Chandler, as I recall I was one of those who denied it. But I think I'm using the term in a little different way here. While I may deny going to strip clubs to actively have a fantasy, I don't deny at all that a strip club is a fantasy place. What I'm suggesting is that maybe everything is. Just a thought at a time of year when reflections seem to occur most often.

And Doverman, there are bad fantasies as well as good ones. Maybe your work is one of the bad ones.

Fantasy isn't the opposite of reality. It's a way that humans make sense of reality. A few months ago, when I started a topic asking what fantasies you have about strippers, hardly anyone acknowledged ever having them, so good luck with this one, FONDL.

There certainly isn't any fantasy to work. Work sucks.