Main points:
- The belief in objective reality is not uncontestable, it is a position that needs to be examined critically and defended, not simply said to be accurate because everyone else believes it, becuase it has simply become naturalized in our society (ie made to seem natural and common sense).
- IM is not a totally uncontestable belief, either, but! It does have some proofs for it.
- To test IM, just start testing it yourself. You're the best person to judge this sort of thing anyway.
- Why are you resisting this so much? On all sides of the argument, I mean. Note the quotations in the middle of my post.
I'd rather side with the LoAers just cause they've taken the challenge to examine their fundamental beliefs about reality critically.
The person who came closest (IMO, since I'm not a practicing scientist) to an understanding of how the scientific method works (at least according to Popper) is sadavis. Scientific method cannot prove anything works, only disprove things. That's one of the reasons a claim like, Thoughts affect reality is so hard disprove, sorta like saying All men are mortal is hard to disprove, because you haven't observed all men. So, claims have to be falsifiable to be testable. If I take the claim that "thoughts don't affect reality outside of direct action", there is a shadow of doubt in that from the studies ALG posted, as well as in The Intention Experiment. Is it fool-proof evidence that LoA works? Not in my opinion, not yet, anyway, but it does make me question the basis of the way we assume reality works. Thus negatively giving some proof for the idea that thoughts do affect reality outside of direct action.
BTW, in physics there is a single attractor force, gravity, and as far as we know, there are no confirmed cases of gravity repelling.
Otherwise, many of us believe we've learned since growing up, things like "reality is objective" or that "thoughts can't do anything outside my own skull". The root of that belief, IMO, is Rene Descartes, especially in his Meditations on First Philosophy, in which I believe he makes some critical errors, which is fine because most philosophers do, however his beliefs became well integrated into our society and societal way of thinking, became "naturalized" and "truthified". One of the key errors, imo, was that Descartes was a substance dualist, which means that he drove a very strong line between the mind and its products and the physical world and its products, especially discounting the importance of the physical. I dunno about you, but that belief messed with me for a long time.
One cool thing about the meditations, though, is when he completely destroys his beliefs in everything in the first chapter. Then he proceeds to build it all up again (with certain holes, but it is a fascinating read, very esay to read, too, highly recommended).
I will post this link again, because no one seems to have indicated that they have read it:
http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/200...nd-resistance/ Quote:
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Resisting an idea emotionally and becoming defensive isn’t the same as disagreeing with an idea. If I tell you that I’m really 250 years old, you may dismiss me as a liar or an idiot, but my statement is unlikely to provoke your emotional resistance or make you defensive. You simply disagree, but you don’t resist. However, if I tell you that you look fat and should change your diet, that may indeed provoke some emotional resistance, depending on the degree to which that statement reflects back to you an area where you need to grow.
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Quote:
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Resistance shows us where we need more conscious clarity. As you recognize and explore resistance in yourself and become more courageous in facing the unfaceable parts of your life, you will in fact become much more conscious and aware, which will increase your ability to face down other areas of resistance with greater success.
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If anyone's interested, my main point of resistance was and still is with LoA that I'm afraid someone will come upto me and say I'm wrong or an idiot or what have you, that sort of just insulting, and just not like me as a person. Food for thought?
Some more food for thought:
Prove that someone in your life loves you. What is your reasoning, evidence and assumptions that lead you to that conclusions?
Prove that rationality is a good tool to use, but since we don't like things that prove themselves (circular arguments), prove rationality is teh awesome using irrational arguments. Even rationality is not uncontestable.
Basically what I want to say is that believing in an objective reality is not the "truth", it is in fact a position that needs to be defended. Just because everyone around you believes it, or that you grew up believing it doesn't mean that its true (depending on how you define truth, anyhoo). I'm not trying to prove LoA works here, just highlight that its much harder to dismiss it than you might think, because proving reality is objective is much harder than you think, and distinguished scientists and philosophers hold positions other than the objective one (as ALG noted). You would aslo want to look at the fact that LoA has been written about for over a hundred years at this point. Its not just New Age (it'd be more accurately called New Thought), or even particularly new.
Ok, but let's ignore Popper for now and say you want proof that LoA works. You have a theory, you just need to find an experiment which is rigourous, methodological and above all, repeatable. There are a few ways to go about it: self-reporting (you might as well call this anecdotal, its pretty unreliable in general but when you get someone like ALG or Paul, its harder to ignore), case studies (again like ALG or Paul, ie get a case study case to repeat an experiment, such as, say, attracting taxi cabs, compared to a normal wait time), and some form of larger experiment in which one would try to influence random events using a group of LoAers, ie, either trying to win some sort of contest and seeing if they win a disproportionate number of prizes, etc. There are, however, problems with each of these methods, the least of which being that certain thoughts could contaminate the results.
You don't even need to go that far, though, just start applying it in your life. When I was first getting into this, I was pretty resistant, too. Some things that helped me was reading The Power of Now, starting to meditate and then starting to intend specific things. I also started to keep a journal of odd coincidences or when things in the outside world reflected my thoughts. The biggest one for me has been finding my bike again, which I described in the Quantum Leap link in my sig.
There used to be a moderator, actually, who wrote on this issue from a philosophical perspective, Brutha maybe, I think ALG remembers him.
I just woke up so I hope all this makes sense. Long post, I guess I haven't written in a while now.