Ghosts and other Paranormalities

[SimonM]

I think this is real.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIw-wfXp5Vw

Bwahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

Breath!

HAhahahahahahahahahahahaha

You were joking, right?

[Snipsky]

Bwahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

Breath!

HAhahahahahahahahahahahaha

You were joking, right?

uh, no. i'm very serious. that doesn't look like a person to you? what does it look like? it scared me

[SimonM]

It was a person far away and at very low light. The "supernatural" aspects of the video were obviously camera glitches from lack of information.

[Drake]

It was a person far away and at very low light. The "supernatural" aspects of the video were obviously camera glitches from lack of information.

Not to mention that it was just a fun video made by a YouTube publisher.

The gullibility here is disturbing.

[Snipsky]

It was a person far away and at very low light. The "supernatural" aspects of the video were obviously camera glitches from lack of information.

what kind of computer glitch? now i'm curious. i don't like peoples who lie to the publics like that. please, can you point them out so i can see more clearly?

[Drake]

what kind of computer glitch? now i'm curious. i don't like peoples who lie to the publics like that. please, can you point them out so i can see more clearly?

They aren't lying. It's entertainment. The problem is when people like you take it seriously.

It was meant to be a fun video, and you took it seriously.

[Snipsky]

They aren't lying. It's entertainment. The problem is when people like you take it seriously.

It was meant to be a fun video, and you took it seriously.

It was? how can you be sure of that? i watched again. i didn't see anything that said it was for entertainment purposes. you're smart. show me where. i don't see it.

[Shǎguā]

Galileo was a great scientist partly because he wasn't afraid to admit when he was wrong, argues Adam Gopnik, who only wishes some of the people who write to him could do the same.

When you write for a living, over time you learn that certain subjects will get set responses. You're resigned to getting the responses before you write the story.

If you write something about Shakespeare, you will get many letters and emails from what we call the cracked (and I think you call the barking), explaining that Shakespeare didn't write the plays that everyone who was alive when he was, said he had.

If you write something about the scandal of American prisons, you will be sent letters, many heartbreaking, from those wrongly imprisoned - and you will also get many letters from those who you're pretty sure couldn't possibly be more rightfully imprisoned. Sorting out what to say to each kind is a big job. (My wife has a simple rule - be nice to the ones who are going to be getting out).

The oddest response, though, is if you write making an obvious point about an historical period or historical figure, you will get lots of letters and emails insisting that the obvious thing about the guy or his time is completely wrong.

If you write about Botticelli as a painter of the Italian Renaissance, you'll be told sapiently that there was never really a renaissance in Italy for him to paint in. If you write about Abraham Lincoln and emancipation, you'll be bombarded, on a Fort Sumter scale, with people telling you that the American Civil War wasn't really fought over slavery. The Spanish Inquisition was a benevolent, fact-checking organisation, Edmund Burke was no conservative… On and on it goes.

Now these letters and emails come more often from the half-bright, some of them professional academics, than from the fully bonkers or barking.

You can tell the half-bright from the barking because the barking don't know how little they know, while the half-bright know enough to think that they know a lot, but don't know enough to know what part of what they know is actually worth knowing.

Not long ago, for instance, I wrote an essay about the great Galileo, and the beginnings of modern science. I explained, or tried to, that what made Galileo's work science, properly so-called, wasn't that he was always right about the universe (he was very often wrong) but that he believed in searching for ways of finding out what was right by figuring out what would happen in the world if he wasn't.

One story of that search is famous. When he wanted to find out if Aristotle was right to say that a smaller body would always fall at the same speed as a larger body, he didn't look the answer up in an old book about falling objects. Instead, he threw cannonballs of two different sizes off the Tower of Pisa, and, checking to make sure that no-one was down there, watched what happened. They hit the ground at the same time.

That story may be a legend - but it's a legend that points towards a truth.

We know for certain that he attempted lots of adventures in looking that were just as decisive. He looked at stars and planets and the way cannonballs fell on moving ships - and changed the mind of man as he did. We call it the experimental method, and if science had an essence, that would be it.

In 1632 Galileo wrote a great book - his Dialogue On Two World Systems. It's one of the best books ever written because it's essentially a record of a temperament, of a kind of impatience and irritability that leads men to drop things from towers and see what happens when they fall.

He invented a dumb character for the book named Simplicio and two smart ones to argue with him. The joke is that Simplicio is the most erudite of the three - the dumb guy who thinks he's the smart guy (the original half-bright guy), who's read a lot but just repeats whatever Aristotle says. He's erudite and ignorant.

Galileo wasn't naive about experiments. He always emphasises the importance of looking for yourself. But he also wants to convince you that sometimes it's important not to look for yourself, not just to trust your own eyes, and that you have to work to understand the real meaning of what you're seeing.

But on every page of that wonderful book, he's trying to imagine a decisive test - dropping a cannonball from a ship's mast, or digging a hole in the ground and watching the Moon - to help you argue your way around the universe.

There's a lovely moment, it could be the motto of the scientific revolution, when Salviati, one of his alter egos, says, "Therefore Simplicio, come either with arguments and demonstrations and bring us no more Texts and authorities, for our disputes are about the Sensible World, and not one of Paper."

In that essay I wrote about Galileo I compared him to John Dee, the famous English magician, alchemist and astrologer, who was one of his contemporaries who was also a consultant to Queen Elizabeth I, and who read everything there was to read in his time and knew everything there was to know in the esoterica of his time - but didn't know what was worth knowing.

He knew a lot about Copernicus, for instance, but he also spent half his life trying to talk to angels and have demons intervene to help him turn lead into gold.

Well, it turns out that John Dee the magician and astrologer has his admirers - indeed his web pages and his fan clubs and his chatboard, just like Harry or Liam or Justin - and they took up the cause of the old alchemist with me. How dare you knock John, his fans, some of them half-bright, some of them just a little, well, barking, insisted. Wasn't he a formidably erudite man particularly on just those subjects - stars and orbits and falling objects - that Galileo cared about too? Why shut him out of the scientific creed.

Well, that was the point I was making. And it seems to me worth making again - and then again and then again. It just can't be made too often.

The scientific revolution wasn't an extension in erudition. It involved instead what we might call a second-order attitude to erudition - and if that sounds fancy, it just means the human practice of calling bull on an idea which you think is full of it, and being unafraid to do so.

Dee was a learned man - too learned a man, in fact, in whose head all kinds of stuff lodged, some obviously silly and some in retrospect sane, but impacted together like trash in a dump heap. Above all, his work is filled with supernatural explanations - with angels and demons and astrological spells.

Galileo, emphatically did not believe in magic. Galileo has no time for supernatural explanations of any kind - indeed, when he goes wrong, as he did when he rejected the idea that the Moon causes the tides, it's because he resists the right explanation because it just sounds too strange or magical.

Galileo, emphatically did not believe in magic. Galileo has no time for supernatural explanations of any kind - indeed, when he goes wrong, as he did when he rejected the idea that the Moon causes the tides, it's because he resists the right explanation because it just sounds too strange or magical.

John Dee believes in some things that now belong to science - but in a hundred others that don't. And not once in his life did he ever seem to ask the essential question - is this idea bull or is it for real?

The smartest people of his time knew the score. Ben Jonson wrote his play, The Alchemist, about someone just like Dee. And he called his alchemist Subtle, exactly to make the point that you could be very subtle and very silly all at the same time.

History has taught us that science didn't just happen in a burst. Alchemy and astrology evolved slowly and over time into chemistry and astronomy. Galileo even made a buck in his youth by casting horoscopes for rich people.

There were no bright lines. Indeed sometimes science slipped back into astrology and alchemy and superstition and the occult. It's well-known that Isaac Newton spent a lifetime searching for the Philosopher's Stone.

But science never slipped all the way back. This new habit of throwing things off towers to see how fast they really fell, this experimental method, made sure that it couldn't. Truth no longer depended on the prestige, or the intelligence or even the integrity of any one person. That's why Galileo had the last laugh on the inquisitors.

Well, why does any of this matter except to historians and the barking, or half-bright?

It matters because every time we make science more esoteric than it really is, we make modern life - which depends on science - more complicated than it needs to be.

The glory of modern science is that, while only a very few can understand its particular theories, anyone can understand its peculiar approach - it is simply the perpetual assertion of experience over authority, and of debate over dogma.

Galileo looked at stars and planets and the way cannon balls fell on moving ships - and changed the mind of man as he did.

When we insist, as all the wisest child psychologists do now, that every child is like a small scientist, we don't mean that she has esoteric knowledge of a broad range of subjects, or talks to angels, or makes lead into gold.

We mean that she makes a theory about how her blocks are going to fall down and then tests it by knocking them over. And her range of knowledge in that way grows by leaps and bounds.

Science is really just that child's groping, with wings on - no, not with wings on, rather up on stilts, awkward-looking earthbound instruments, that get you high enough to see the world.

There's supposed to be a sign up on the Tower Of Pisa: "Please don't throw things from this tower". That sign is the best memorial that Galileo could ever have.

Of course, I'm not sure that it's actually there. I'll have to go and look.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22105898

[Syn7]

It was? how can you be sure of that? i watched again. i didn't see anything that said it was for entertainment purposes. you're smart. show me where. i don't see it.

"You can tell the half-bright from the barking because the barking don't know how little they know, while the half-bright know enough to think that they know a lot, but don't know enough to know what part of what they know is actually worth knowing."

[SimonM]

A peculiarity of digital cameras is that a CCD has a threshold below which nothing registers on that pixel. When an object moves across a field with a combination of low light, low resolution and distance it will pass in and out of that threshold. This causes the moving figure to contort and seemingly fade as it moves.

Besides that, the slim man is entirely a construction of creative minds on the web. There is no legitimate mythology surrounding that figure prior to about 2008 or so.

Here's my reference for the fictional nature of the slender man story.

I feel safe saying anything coming from something awful / creepypasta and a game by Yahzee Croshaw is not real.

But of course I am part of the Illuminati so I might be lying to you so that I can continue to hide the TRUTHtm

[Syn7]

A peculiarity of digital cameras is that a CCD has a threshold below which nothing registers on that pixel. When an object moves across a field with a combination of low light, low resolution and distance it will pass in and out of that threshold. This causes the moving figure to contort and seemingly fade as it moves.

Besides that, the slim man is entirely a construction of creative minds on the web. There is no legitimate mythology surrounding that figure prior to about 2008 or so.

Here's my reference for the fictional nature of the slender man story.

I feel safe saying anything coming from something awful / creepypasta and a game by Yahzee Croshaw is not real.

But of course I am part of the Illuminati so I might be lying to you so that I can continue to hide the TRUTHtm

Hey, I already trademarked TRUTH. You owe me money you illuminati scum!!!

[sanjuro_ronin]

In some of the social sciences eye witness accounts do matter. For sure. And we shouldn't view one perspective as the way things went down either. Of course we always do. But then that's why we seek more objective evidence.


A lot of our history is based solely on eye witness accounts and I believe that is a mistake. But the accounts quite often do have value. It's a place to start anyways. Then you can seek out real evidence.

The siege of Alesia, we are pretty sure it happened but there is some dispute about the exact location. Many believe it was Alise-Sainte-Reine, but we don't know for sure and we may never know. And since their was so much activity all over the region, there are artifacts everywhere.

I gotta say though, from a strategic point of view, if it really went down the way people think it did, Caesar was beyond genius. Ballsy move to ring yourself in like that against so many with so little. Modern estimates that the relief force was about double. But there's another good example, because Plutarch said it was 300 thousand. Grain of salt, right. Like look at Marius success at the battle at Vercellae. Were the numbers really that high? or were they inflated for political and patriotic reasons?

All valid points of course.
We may even have number errors simply because of scribal error.
Of course Historians will point out that what is crucial is that a battle DID happen and that it changed t course of history ( the numbers and exact location being irrelevant).

An example I like to use:
3 guys rob a bank and there are 3 eye witnesses:
1)- They came in at lunch time, went right to a teller, passed her a note, got the money and took off, they were all black and wore dark clothes.
2) -They came in after lunch, yelled for the teller to give them the money and took off, they were east indian and were wearing blue overalls.
3)- They came in at around 1PM, they spoke to the teller and she gave them the money, first 1 left then the other two, they wore one piece jumpsuits that were black and they were dark skinned, maybe hispanic or something like that.

Conflicting? Nope, all were correct in all the details that mattered:
3 men, dark skinned wearing dark overalls, came in between 12 and 1, went to one of the tellers, got their money and left.

The rest and differences were based on the perspectives of the various eye witnesses ( when is lunch hour?, dark skin = what ethnic background?, etc).

Historical accounts tend to be that way also, the "historian" prioritizing what He/She is focusing on at the moment and what He/She thinks is crucial of his/her audience.

[David Jamieson]

Yes, but in the case of the bank robbers, there is corroboration of evidence as well.

There is money missing. There is a note. etc.
So again, the eye witness testimony is only held up by the evidence that there was indeed a crime that took place.

Also historical accounts are often in the form of factual treatises that take both accounts of events into consideration and through factual layout either form a truth or leave the reader to decide. the outcomes are often what delineates the reality of the event that led up to it.

This is how we can understand the migration of Buddhism into China for instance. Without knowing exactly which monk did what, we seethe outcomes in the reality of the practice as it exists.

We can also look at wars in the same light and know that the propaganda and rhetoric was not necessarily the truth of a matter.

Because of this type of thinking, we know the Tokyo firebombings did more damage than the nukes that were used.

Because of this type of thinking and fact collection we know that the Dresden firebombing was an atrocity and so on and so forth. With more ancient information, we have to rely on an archaeological record more so than a written one.

But, with eye witness reports, they only stand up if their is corroborative and supporting hard evidence. Otherwise, they're just a story.

There is a real bank robbery, then there is fiction. both describe a robbery, but only one is real and it can only be found to be real through the supporting evidence.

[SoCo KungFu]

Basically what DJ said. But I would like to add one more piece. This topic isn't about, "did something happen?"

Something happened. That's not the question. The question is, what happened and more importantly, how did it happen?

These questions are the type that eye witness, personal experience, etc. are simply not suitable to answer.

Really, this is where I have a huge issue with historians/theologians/etc, in general. When they attempt to engage in issues regarding mechanistic matters (and I throw in "why and how was XXX ancient city sacked?", "did Jesus resurrect? and how?", etc.) into that category above, then their evidence is often simply not up to standard.

The good ones do as DJ listed above, multiple documents corroborating single facts, etc. But even then, without reproduction (which is almost impossible with history, unless we're talking physical processes), its still a huge assumption.

[Snipsky]

Basically what DJ said. But I would like to add one more piece. This topic isn't about, "did something happen?"

Something happened. That's not the question. The question is, what happened and more importantly, how did it happen?

These questions are the type that eye witness, personal experience, etc. are simply not suitable to answer.

Really, this is where I have a huge issue with historians/theologians/etc, in general. When they attempt to engage in issues regarding mechanistic matters (and I throw in "why and how was XXX ancient city sacked?", "did Jesus resurrect? and how?", etc.) into that category above, then their evidence is often simply not up to standard.

The good ones do as DJ listed above, multiple documents corroborating single facts, etc. But even then, without reproduction (which is almost impossible with history, unless we're talking physical processes), its still a huge assumption.

**** Off Doofus