Hi cylon. I wonder, though, whether you have learned much about magical thinking and how it works. My previous post criticised the sceptical MrsCogan for dismissing it as impossible, but there are soooooooooooooooooo many reasons (yes, as many as that!) to believe untrue things, particularly if they're exciting, make us feel safe and powerful and are portrayed as secret knowledge or The Answer.
The classic example is believing that you're 'psychic' because people appear to phone you just at the moment you're thinking of them. It seems persuasive to me that we often make the mistake of ridiculously overestimating the number of times this happens, and if we tested it scientifically (notwithstanding earlier criticisms) we would discover our gift to be utterly fictional. First of all, we get excited about it when it happens. We file that effect away in our memories and remember someone down the pub who was ranting about it for several hours. We forget. Then it happens again. We remember the first time, and the bloke in the pub. Maybe he had something after all, even though we thought he was a nut at the time. We get more excited. We file that experience in memory too.
Meanwhile, we do
not get excited about the times we think of Molly (don't ask) and Molly doesn't phone. Can you remember the last failed IM? Probably not, or you won't remember many. Perhaps that is because you have programmed your brain to look for positives, not negatives. In fact, your brain is hardwired to look for patterns in all experience, and if it can't find any it will regularly and habitually
invent them. Starting to 'believe' in whatever - Aliens, IM, psychic abilities - turns up the gain. People hear voices of 'ghosts' in white noise on tapes and radios. We hallucinate apparitions in dark corners. Not only that, this phenomenon increases with arousal states, so people see ghosts in corners more often if they're scared - for instance because someone has told them there's a ghost in the corner!
Here's an anecdote that will illustrate the point. I don't remember the reference to share it with you (or many of the details either, but you'll get the drift; if anyone knows more, please could you post it). It was the story of a tour-guide who took his tourist group to two places one day. The first he said was the site of a terrible attrocity. Everyone shared their feelings of creepiness and pain seeping from the very stones. Then he took them to the site of a religious shrine, and everyone felt uplifted and shared their feelings of peace and tranquility. Everyone amplified each other's faith in the idea that you can really feel the mood left in places from events that have happened there. It was one of those really great, 'deep' nights of insight sitting in the pub. Until, that is, the tour guide realised he'd got his notes mixed up: the hell-hole felt like heaven and vice versa.
There are ENDLESS experiments that demonstrate such phenomena, and they add up to a human mind that is extremely good at making pattern where there isn't any, or making the pattern it expects. Put us together in excited states and we can invent anything from WMD programmes to alien invasions.
Now, I'm fine with people giving me profound explanations as to why that might be so, despite accepting that it is so - things like "If we start to believe we can predict people phoning, the nature of reality is such that that ability does in fact begin to increase - you need to give it more time", or "The universe is so bizarre that saying someone phones me at a particular time needs reassessing completely". I just don't fall for the pollyanna "My God, it says here in my horoscope that something brill was going to happen to me today, and, guess what.......". It's almost certainly pure codswallop.
The faithful here (well-chosen words, btw) keep inviting sceptics to try out IM and see. Well we're not idiots. Some of us have tried it. Or we have tried other experiments. I've tried reading other people's horoscopes, for instance, and guess what?!?!?....
Another thing you have to be wary of is the cold reading phenomenon, which if we're too gullible we can play on ourselves. A simple example might be that I think of Molly (feeling confident of my superhuman abilities). Nothing happens. Oh, I think. Hmmm. Can't be. What me, normal? Then, twelve hours later, Molly's daugher calls. Ahhhhhhh! The Universe was messing with my head for a bit of fun, probably. ...couldn't be that I'm not psychic.
If we're looking for a pattern, excited about finding it, we widen the net until we catch something. You're waiting for bullet points. You'll be watching tv and someone will fire a gun, and there'll be a slo-mo of the bullet. A moment later the victim's friend will gasp and point. You've got your bullet point. For all we know, you might not notice these phenomena and not add them to your so-called experiment, yet subconsciously your brain could file it away under 'hit'. Knowing the mind takes subtlety and time.
Does anyone know a Frank, by the way? I'm channeling now as we speak. Frank. Francis? Begins with an F. You see, there's an open mind, and there's letting your brain fall out. I don't mean to be insulting. Just I went through a phase of that myself. Another illusion some IMers have is that they must be more advanced than sceptics.
I think one of humanity's biggest faults is that we're so uncomfortable with not knowing. Scepticism has a bad name, but it's actually a healthy and quite beautiful philosophy. Most of us don't know really, but won't admit it to ourselves or others, so we swing from belief to non-belief, arguing desperately to convince ourselves and recruit others. Socrates admitted it ("I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance"), so we shouldn't feel too bad, given his reputation as one of the greatest philosophers who ever lived.
Now if you add me writing about bullet points as a hit, you really have lost the plot. On the other hand, you have proved IM - you thought about bullet points and the Universe (I) brought you yet another. Maybe the whole of the rest of the thread will be riddled with them.
