On Nov 19, 3:24 am, "Tom"
comcast.net> wrote:>> On Nov 18, 6:01 pm, "Tom"
comcast.net> wrote:>>> "m-urana"
gmail.com> wrote in message>
>
>>>> On Nov 18, 9:12 am, "Tom"
comcast.net> wrote:>
>>>>> The only reasonable thing to do is to develop some method for
>>>>> increasing
>>>>> real understanding while decreasing believing in silly shit. Several
>>>>> methods for doing this have been put forth over the past four thousand
>>>>> years
>>>>> or so. Some of them seem more successful than others, but, as I said
>>>>> before, the consequences of ones actions can vary for no discernable
>>>>> reason.
>
>>>> most of them were certified ko0ks in my opinion, and some of them were
>>>> even LEGENDARY ko0ks.
>
>>> If a kook is a person acting out or promulgating silly beliefs, then
>>> those
>>> who minimize the amount of silly things they believe are necessarily not
>>> kooks. They may have started out kooky, but they're got better. They
>>> may
>>> be strange and hard to understand, but they're not kooks. Of course, if
>>> you
>>> use a different definiton of "kook" than I do, then you can pick one you
>>> like and stick with it instead.
>
>> wot? why do you assume the people im talking about minimized.... i
>> didn't tell you that or their stories.
>
> Perhaps you were merely injecting a tangental comment that had nothing to do
> with what I was talking about. I was talking about people who decreased
> their beliefs in silly shit. Apparently you were talking about something
> else.
>
>> also some of the stories were
>> not even about them, but fantastic stories about things they couldn't
>> possible know were true or not that just got their brain caught up in
>> it that's all... like stories that support what actually is their own
>> perceptions of the world, maybe. anyway.
>
> Those are not the people to whom I was referring.
>
>>> That's the thing about stories. They are ephemeral, insubstantial. They
>>> cannot be trusted to accurately represent reality. To get at what's
>>> really
>>> happening, you have to step outside the stories. You put aside both
>>> romanticism and realism and just look right at stuff without telling any
>>> story at all.
>
>> they cannot be trusted to accurately represent reality, but if you
>> don't care what's actually happening ... light that splif and let's
>> get started.
>
> I'm not sure I'm following your train of thought here. It sounds like
> you're saying that you have to believe all these stories, regardless of
> their truthfulness, or you don't care what's happening. Is that your point?
no you didn't follow my train of thought at all. i didn't BELIEVE in
any of it. after all of my emphasis on this point how could you have
missed it, is a mystery.
you don't have to believe in anything to be entertained by it.
>
>>>> there was some sifting by me, but it really wasn't worth it. to me it
>>>> was all pure fantasy, and i listened to it as that. usually i
>>>> wouldn't even bother to think about the source behind the stories, i
>>>> just listened. some, who definitely are ko0k, were also genuinely
>>>> psychic.
>
>>> I suspect we have a different definition for "genuine" here.
>
>>>> this isn't a lab, it's uselessnet, and i have no incentive
>>>> to prove it to you...
>
>>> Then it remains unproved assertion that may not be "genuine" at all.
>
>> "it's going to be a bumpy ride... with tom listening."
>
> Just the occasional nudge to keep you from falling asleep.
>
>
zzzzzzz
:)
>
>
>
>>>> but magic DID happen with one or two of them.
>
>>> Something that you won't accept any other explanation for happened.
>>> Anything that happens and which presents no easy solution as to how it
>>> happened is going to be regarded as magic. Remember the Goetia
>>> definition
>>> of magic:
>
>>> "Magic is the highest most absolute and divine knowledge of natural
>>> philosophy advanced in its works and wonderful operations by a right
>>> understanding of the inward and occult vertue of things, so that true
>>> agents
>>> being applied to proper patients, strange and admirable effects will
>>> thereby
>>> be produced; whence magicians are profound and diligent searchers into
>>> nature, they because of their skill know how to anticipate an effect
>>> which
>>> to the vulgar shall seem a miracle."
>
>> i like how that part of my own story so caught your Robotnic mode
>> "verify verify verify" attention that you broke it up into 3 parts and
>> paid 80%% of your attention on only that.
>
> Robots don't verify anything. It's conscious, living people who do that.
> Robots just do as they're told.
robots get stuck in repetetition patterns. robots are also very
computational and dont find much emotional value in just listening to
a story, that's a more human attitude. like just then, you show a
lack of consciousness and a large amount of AI, in your inability to
understand what i meant by Robot.
>
>> how the F can anyone prove anything off usenet, on usenet.
>
> Nobody asked you to prove anything, but it you're going to assert some
> controversial claim as a fact, you've got to expect a challenge. YOu
> asserted "genuine psychic" powers, but absolutely nobody has ever been able
> to establish that any claim, any claim whatsoever, for such a power was
> true.
>
lighten up. Robotnic!
>> the reason *I* was convinced, and you have absolutely no reason to be
>> so for your own comfort don't tie yourself in knots about it, is
>> because i was a part of the experiments. we played "Aura" games, in
>> which one person would change the colour and size of their aura and i
>> would note what i saw, and then verify it by him telling me what he
>> did after.
>
> Sloppy. A little control for experimenter bias and the whole thing falls
> down like a badly constructed house of cards.
>
yep too right, but it was something. and *I* was after all the one who
saw the aura with my own eyes(?). and the television experiment was
less possibily hallucinatory. but i'm not looking for a nobel prize
for proving the paranormal or some shit, i was just a teenager fucking
around. loosen up.
a little digging into why i might have come to believe these things i
understand, but don't fuck up the whole conversation over such petty
reality-check anxieties and the bad attitude you come across with when
you stumble over these things. lighten up... it was such a minor part
of my post, and the UNprovability of it is entirely admitted by me.
it isn't my agenda to do so. anyone who can't read one sentence of
oddity without completely blowing their truth-fuse can move on.
>> or once, more impressively, we were able to turn the
>> television on and off by sending and taking energy to / from it... one
>> of us sent and one of us took. that was startling. uhm. oh yeah
>> all by myself i used to have some intimacy with electrical lights and
>> could dim and brighten them... returning to school after a period of
>> strange-events, bragging to my friends about the light-thing, the
>> flurescent above my head blew out.
>
> Taking credit for random events is not the way to establish causality. I
> don't believe you can turn the televison set on and off by exerting some
> sort of mental power at a distance. You would have to show me the
> well-conducted, replicable experiments, verified through independent
> observation first. Until then, all you've got are the typical whoppers that
> always crop up in any conversation about psychic powers and which never,
> ever are verified as authentic phenomena. But I see that this is all past
> tense. You say you "used to" do this, but you can't now. You think it
> happened way back when but you can't do it now. Yep, all those amazing
> feats are things of the past. You remember what I said about the past.
> It's not reality. Reality is what's happening right now.
lighten up . they're interesting stories to me. i came to believe
it not for one experiment, but for the many of them, all in the same
period of time... and just that constancy of so many coincidences,
with so many witnesses, was enough for me to believe. and believe me,
belief doesn't mean know. i've always been open to the idea. but you
know what? it wouldn't shake the foundations of my life if it all
turned out to be a collective hallucination. lighten up, stop s-
nagging, Robotnic!
