Ontologies cannot swallow. But people can. So the issue is not whether one could be a scientists and be open to reincarnation. The issue is whether scientists are open to it, would, for example, not ridicule and professionally punish a colleague who started looking into, would suppress evidence, push against research funds going into, etc. Of course there are scientists who believe in reincarnation, but they are pushed to the periphery. And scientist groupies are taught to view them as flakes.
I agree that this happens. The reason is that scientists have limited resources, and they have to assume that religious dogma is not based on reality, but on human hopes. They also know that there are millions of people who are very, very, very eager to have the same strength of empirical evidence for their faith that scientists have for evolution by natural selection. There are foundations and funds devoted to finding the proof of an afterlife, a soul, the power of prayer, etc... Since this crowd is heavily biased on finding something supernatural, and is throwing so many resources into the search, the scientific community can focus its energies elsewhere and wait for experiments to re-create. Your call would be no different than young British girls complaining that biologists don't spend enough time looking in gardens for fairies, so they can't be sure that they are not there. And they really, really believe in them, and would love to have proof of their existence, but those mean, old, bad biologists keep *assuming* that fairies aren't real based solely on the simple fact that nobody has ever seen one.
There is no reason to assume that religious dogman is based on hope. In fact to assume that is to go against their own principles. it's a theory worth testing and some have. But scientists will then find that many base their beliefs on experience and not just hopes and no experience. The fairy argument doesn't work. My problem is not that they do not do that research. let them follow their interests. It is the assumptions and smugness about things they know little about that bothers me. It would be a moot issue but it carries a lot of sway in society and how children are trained to experience the world. What they can experience and nto be shamed, for example. And of course people have seen fairies. And ghosts. I have seen ghosts. Any certainty you have that I have not is based not on science but on assumptions. fine, have your assumptions, but don't confuse it with rationality. Scientists adn their groupies need a controlled not too emotional environment. They tend to have certain skills, mental and otherwise. What is sad is that they promote these as the only ones, not facing their own fears about what it would mean if there were other people with different skills, perhaps ones based more on intuition and emotion. The fact that they assume that religious people have their beliefs because it suits their emotional needs is fairly telling. They assume this because they know, on some level, that this is where their beliefs come from. They often think they don't really have these beliefs because their beliefs are in the negative. But you can really need things not to be true. that's where denial comes from.
We should force scientists to perform experiments that they don't want to perform? Why don't we let people such as yourself perform the experiments that YOU want to perform, and you can present your results to the rest of us. The scientific method works. Blaming the people who use it when the results don't conform to your liking is just silly. Go out and use it yourself. There are many supernaturalists out there doing just this very thing. I look forward to some positive results, because I, like most scientists that I know, ADORE updating our ontology. We are not close-minded cultists the way you portray us, we are EAGER to discover new things. But they must be reproducible, they must conform to observation. They must make testable predictions. Otherwise it is just a bunch of anecdotal evidence. Scientists are often accused of not appreciating how unreliable the human senses can be. Nothing is further from the truth. The opposite is the case. Scientists distrust human senses so thoroughly that no single positive result will ever sway any of them. I have been sleep-deprived at sea and seen pirate ships and bodies floating in the water. I have heard my father whistle at me while he is thousands of miles away. But I have also had dreams where I can fly, and have been shot a few times. I heard the gunshot, I felt it hit me, I remember bleeding to death and crossing over to a deep-darkness. But none of these things really happened. The part of my brain that recreates the outside world, can also misfire and create a false, internal world. Which is why ghost-stories are never enough. Respectfully.
Well, some scientists have been studying reincarnation and come up with some interesting results. The most prominent person in this field would be Dr. Ian Stevenson.
God I think we are all energy, and perhaps that is what "God" is. We are energy held togeather by physical bodies and when we "die" our energy is free to return to "God" or another physical body. Everything starts with thought, which is energy, and so much of our brains ability is not conscious, so who knows what we are creating?
I realize there were two negatives in the sentence, but I stated directly that I had no problem with scientists NOT doing such research. Which is why I followed that sentence by saying they should follow their interests. The rest of the paragraph also would be odd with your misinterpretation. And the way you misread me is a perfect example of how you probably keep yourself from having more convincing experiences. You assumed I had a certain belief - that scientists SHOULD do research backing up my beliefs - and read a hallucinated paragragh where I seemed to say that. I would guess that you assumed this because of other beliefs I was putting out and you assumed that they came as a certain family. but you were wrong and your belief kept you from experiencing reality. That happens even more strongly with phenomena that the church has said are evil and that scientists and their rationalist groupies have trained us it would be foolish to acknowledge as real. With those phenomena the stakes are even higher than a disagreement on the internet. that is the box I am angry scientists have helped build in all our minds. I am not angry about what they discover through their double blind tests. I am not angry if they do not research things that interest me. (besides some of them do) I am angry when they assume they know things they do not. I am angry about the way they have contributed to the culture of shame around taking certain experiences and knowledge seriously. My ghost stories prove nothing to you, of course. but I base MY beliefs on my experiences and they are rational.
If you trust your sensory perceptions 100%, you will form an irrational personal philosophy. There must be some checks and balances from our peers, to weed out the false positives and the tricks played on us by our psychology. The brain is a funny thing. It looks for patterns. It looks for faces. It looks for things to have been caused by intelligent agents. It is primed to be superstitious. It is designed to work in the wild, not as a perfect epistemological tool. Treating it as the former will get you somewhere, as the latter it will lead you astray. At least... that's what the guys in the white labcoats tell me. And I trust them.
Swivel, If you saw a ghost would you believe in them? Do you agree that if ghosts do exist it would be impossible to scientifically provide proof of their existence?
Sure, ignore all the points I made and restate one you made. I never said you should trust your sensory perceptions 100%. I can see how that might be one possible implication of what I was saying, but to assume it, well it supports your point about brains misfiring, but it also supports mine: rationalists cut a lot of reality out and make as many or more assumptions than those they see as irrational. It also shows one of your fears. If I open myself to intuitions than my beliefs will be random and therefore mostly false. Such lack of faith in your own intuition! I'll take a final shot at this then abandon the thread. 50 years ago if you considers animals as creatures in some ways like us who had emotions it could affect your career, your ability to publish, your job. In a long line from Descartes scientists treated and thought of animals as complicated machines. (sometimes in contradisction to us, sometimes we were also machines). The criticism of 'anthropomorphizing' animals did not affect many people outside the lab - often people who worked or lived with animals - who knew better. had they proved that animals had emotions via double blind studies? No. Hell, how do you prove something like that. What they got directly via intuition was that animals had emotional states and one can learn to recognize these. Over time the scientific community has shifted on this issue. Jeffrey Moussaif Masson wrote a wonderful book tracking this issue. I'm afraid I don't know the title. My point in all this is that the existence of the emotional and conscious lives of animals were considered non-existent or best not referred to because they were not proven. this was incorrect. It was not best not to refer to it and all those 'naive' believers were right. How does this relate to 'supernatural phenomena'. Despite a lack of proof, intelligent people recognized a pattern, you could call it sentience, in animals. Scientists considered this a folk beliefs. They were wrong. Scientists think it is best to assume something is dead and unconscious unless there is proof otherwise. (read that one again) This assumption has never been tested. And please note this is both a methodological belief AND and lifestyle belief. In other words scientists and even worse rationalists who don't know or practice much science themselves believe it is BETTER TO ASSUME THIS. And they make this clear in many overt and indirect ways. Let me make a jump to elephants. Some very good observers had the impression that elephants could communicate over large distances. THERE WAS NO MECHANISM THAT COULD EXPLAIN THIS. A woman who had worked with whales did finally prove (as a scientist and in ways that scientists like) that the elephants were in fact communicating using extremely low frequencies. Some of those who noted the pattern, before scientists could come along and prove it, were told that there was no mechanism. They were hallucinating a pattern, to put it in terms similar to yours. But this was not the case. Another scientific assumption: it is best to assume things at a distance are not affecting each other even if you have a gut feeling they are UNLESS SOME SORT OF DOUBLE BLIND STUDY IS DONE. again this is a metaphysical assumption: it says that disconnection is more likely than connection and that intuition is random. it is also a lifestyle assumption: it is best if everyone does nto trust their intuition unless it fits with CURRENT SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE. These assumptions have not been tested. At least not scientifically. Consider for a moment that some people might have intuitions that are well honed and accurate and they don't simply belief any potential gestalt that forms. The fact is that sometimes people are right in recognizing patterns that we cannot prove yet. hell, Einstein was one of them. So were Native Americans who saw vastly more interconnectedness between humans and nature than the incoming europeans. It's taken hundreds of years for a solid faction of europeans to get this, but even so, is it in time? One could extrapolate from the elephants example to parapsychology sorts of issues. A last point, then bye bye. The original post seemed to be saying that poeple are believing in things they have not experienced. That is ridiculous. We are not all Bible thumpers doing what some authority has told us and thinking what an authority has told us to think. Sure many believers in supernatural (as yet unexplained natural phenomena) believe because they want to and have not had experiences. Just as most believers in Darwinian evolution could not explain it and never really understood it, but took it on cause that's what Daddy adn the school said was true. (and by the way I believe in Evolution, with provisos around punctuated equilibria and some of the intracellular finds that have been made recently) Myself, I do not feel like I have to wait around for science to prove everything before I believe in it. Scientific experimentation is an excellent tool for discovering things. But it's not the only way to gain knowledge. (period) Reincarnation, the topic of the thread, has of course been studied by some scientists and there some have been convinced by what they found. If you think pure science keeps this from being acknowledged you are naive. Repectfully right back and take care, Grant
I have seen ghosts. And no, I do not believe in them. It was something I saw while extremely sleep-deprived. I disagree. If ghosts exist, it would be very easy to prove their existence. Here's one way: Since ghosts can see what is going on in our world, we set up an experiment where a room is sealed off from observers. Inside this room there are a dozen playing cards from a normal deck. These cards are laid out in some random order by one of our experimenters, who does this while blindfolded, and makes their way out of the room by feeling along a tether. Nobody knows which cards were put down, and in what order. The rest of the deck is left in the room, face-down. Now, we ask our ghost to go through the sealed door or walls of the room, and look at the cards. We want the ghost to come back and tell us which cards are up, and in which order. They can use physical gestures if the ghost cannot talk. If we can keep repeating this experiment, and the ghost always gets the cards 100% correct, then we can believe that the ghost is real. There would be no other way for the information in that room to make it outside of the room. Another thing that might convince me: If I saw a ghost, and it was able to tell me things that I am incapable of knowing myself, but can confirm afterwards. But trusting my own eyes on a single occasion? Or the tales of others? No way. I might as well believe in the Loch Ness monster, Big Foot, Unicorns, God, Aliens, Goblins, Astrology, Numerology, Reflexology, Aromatherapy, Chiropractors, feng shui, fairies, etc...
Umm Swivel, I think if there were a ghost that you could communicate with well enough that it could participate in an experiment that in itself would be proof.
No *******, My point is that if the paranormal phenomenon of ghosts exist it would be exceedingly hard to provide scientific proof of it. Is english your second language?
Me too. I fantasize about it all the time. I really would love to see the world 100 years from now, 1,000 years from now 100,000 years from now. I also fantasize about time-travel. I pretend that I can go back in time, blend in with the locals, and take notes and photographs and report back here about all the wonderful things I'm seeing. The difference between me, and some of the other people in this thread, is that I can enjoy my fantasy without pretending that it is a reality. I know that time travel is impossible. 100%. Not a doubt in my mind. I also know that reincarnation is not possible with the exact same degree of confidence. But this knowledge does not prevent me from reveling in the warm fantasy of what-if.
Me too. Time-travel is one of my biggest fantasies and I try to feed my feelings with movies and books about time-travel. Or books and movies based on life in the past or future. As a dreamer I do think this is not possible, my rationality does not let me believe it's possible. Reincarnation is also just like that for me. Nice to fantasize about but far from reality.
