Quote:
Originally Posted by hkalchemy  It seems to me that we choose our beliefs and then reality ripples out from there. If you believe that LOA and all that stuff is a load of nonsense, then of course you'll find no evidence for it, just as atheists will find no evidence for God. But if you choose to believe in God, you'll find God everywhere. Whether God (or the LOA) is real is another question. Is anything real? |
That's a very concise statement of the general theory, hkalchemy, and of course, within certain limitations I'd say it has some validiy. We tend to see the kinds of things ('evidence') we are looking for, which are those that are already part of our belief system. However, I feel it leaves very big and important gaps and is possibly quite wrong fundamentally. I was happy believing it for a while. Now it seems to me that there are large parts of reality that ripples along quite nicely whatever I believe. I tend to think nowadays that if you believe in LOA you will
appear to find evidence, but that is purely a trick of the mind (which psychology has demonstrated), and if God is real only for my when I believe in it, it makes it a curious sort of God to me.
It comes down to what we think should constitute evidence. Because if you understand the ways that the mind gets tricked into believing things that aren't true, you know that we need to collect data fairly, according to mathematically or philosophically defensible principles. That means collecting data against a hypothesis as well as for it, to compare them, or taking control situations into account.
If, for instance, I decide that I can predict the future, and I'm a bit wooly in my thinking, and I experiment by taking something random like "mouse", and I sit and concentrate on images of mice for an hour, chanting "mouse, mouse, mouse", and then I'm sitting later watching TV and suddenly a trailer for a wildlife documentary includes a mouse, I will consider this good evidence and think I'm making progress. This is the kind of 'evidence' people 'find' all the time, but if you learn about the principles involved in this kind of thing, you discover that there are natural psychological pressures to believe these are significant events when they are pure coincidence.
I dare to say "are" rather than "might be" coincidence because of the weight of
scientifically tested, repeatable evidence for such self-delusive functions of the mind. Indeed, the sad thing is that LoA and IM theories
notice the effects, but misinterpret their meaning. Not only do they include all sorts of false positive 'evidence' (indeed, if it was a field vole in the trailer, or an advert for a computer mouse, the wooly thinker might include it), they ignore evidence against. When challenged to make something change out there in subjective reality, and they can't manage it, they find excuses - they're not masterful enough yet, their preconceptions are too strong, they're having an off day, anything to allow them to continue to believe they're psychic. The history of psychic research is absolutely full of such people, sincere believers who are sure they can prove their abilities, who go away angry because the scientists, with their more level-headed approach, find that their predictions or readings are correct no more often than one would expect by chance.
There's a difference between saying "I tend to see what I want to see" and "My beliefs change reality".