“Actress Lily Collins said she believed the spirits of notorious serial killer Ted Bundy’s victims visited her while she was preparing for her role in a new film about the mass murderer.”
“She said that these paranormal visits came at 3:05 a.m. every night. She never knew why she woke up at that exact same time every night, until she learned a little more about the schedule of ghosts. ‘I discovered that 3 a.m. is the time when the veil between the realms is the thinnest and one can be visited,’ she said.
It’s good to know that even in the ethereal realm, ghosts still maintain daylight savings time.
A lot of nonsense is published in “peer” reviewed journals. Lots.
Is there something of that nature that is the subject of scientific scrutiny, with results being published in a peer-reviewed science journal?
In answer to your question, yes there is.
https://mysteriousuniverse.org/2018/05/neuroscientists-uncover-proof-of-human-precognition/
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00146/full
Of course, statistics can only show correlations and make inferences, it doesn’t actually explain the phenomena.
There is no indication in the study that this is paranormal in any way. It seems to be in the category of natural, physical processes not yet understood. “The mechanisms underlying PAA are not yet clear, but two viable yet difficult-to-test hypotheses are that quantum processes are involved in human physiology or that they reflect fundamental time symmetries inherent in the physical world.”
The fact that there are things we don’t understand about time sequencing on a microscopic level doesn’t mean that there is an explanation outside the physiological.
That’s true of any phenomena. Ultimately there is no such thing as the paranormal. The term is a catchall for anything that may be occurring that’s outside the realm of established scientific knowledge. If ESP (Or PSI) is proven to exist, ultimately the proof would require a scientific explanation. Should that occur, at that point, ESP would no longer be paranormal science, it would just be normal science.
1.There are people who claim they received information from dead parents and the like. Things such as where a lost will is, and other less tangible items. Of course, these sorts of anecdotes can never be verified or falsified. Anybody can reply “you made that up” or “you were told and forget that you were told.”
In the Cracked article there are claims like that though where a police officer claims to have been ‘visited’ by a murder victim. Of course, these things can only be anecdotes.
This goes right to what Marcello Truzzi realized: there is no such thing as extraordinary evidence, there is only ordinary evidence. What sort of ordinary evidence could ever conclusively show a person received information from a dead person?
“If you want to believe Ted Bundy is hovering around in the ether chatting up actresses – fine – but leave me out of it.” – A Rock
Wow, that rock really is as dumb as a rock. Lily Collins did not claim Ted Bundy was hovering around, she said his victims were hovering around. That rock must have granite in its ears.
“Dumb as a rock” is probably a good approximation.
Theological discussions aside, calling her “dumb as a rock” might not be fair. After all, these comments have drawn free publicity for the movie. I for one, had no idea this film existed prior to this.
So there’s that.
There are more things to Heaven and earth, Scoopy, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Au contraire. There are no things in heaven at all, and my philosophy encompasses anything that might reasonably be said to be on earth.
By the way, the correct line possibly should read “our philosophy” rather than “your philosophy.” The First Folio version is generally regarded as the acting version that was in use at the time Shakespeare’s collected works were published.
There is, of course, debate among scholars about which version represents Shakey’s intention.
I don’t know what’s true and what isn’t here, but your (or our) veritable Cracked Magazine has reported other people making similar claims in similar situations to Lily Collins.
If it’s in Cracked, you know it’s true!
Although sometimes I like to consult MAD to see it they’re in agreement.
What I do know is this. Anybody who can prove any kind of paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event under controlled conditions, including psychic powers, ESP or contacts with the dead, can get very rich – and nobody has done it yet in the entire history of the human race, so I’m not expecting a change any time soon. And I’m still waiting for Houdini to contact us.
Or to word it another way, there is absolutely nothing on earth undreamt in my philosophy, and nothing in heaven period, despite a line that was written for a single character by the greatest wordsmith in the history of human language.
Funny you mention Houdini and speaking from beyond (I’m sure you did it for a reason) but he was extremely outspoken against spiritualists and mediums as he thought they were all charlatans and made it a point to debunk them whenever he had the opportunity.
Before his death, Houdini left secret codes with family and friends — messages that if heard during a séance would prove Houdini really was trying to say hello.
Still waiting.
Scoopy, your comment seems like a compelling argument on the surface, but I don’t think it actually holds water. There are two things you may be referring to: people with psychic powers who get wealthy through investing in the stock market or in business or The Million Dollar Challenge.
In the first case, no wealthy person is forced to state how they got wealthy, and it makes sense, at least based on the t.v dramas on this, for people with psychic abilities to not tell anybody. So, if psychic abilities are fairly rare, they’d be real and it’s likely nobody would hear about it.
If psychic abilities are more common, it’s likely at least a few of them would come forward to tell the world how they got wealthy and, for all I know, people have, but most people would just dismiss these claims, as with people who claim to be visited by space aliens. So, people could well have come forward, but they are dismissed by most and likely harassed by a few, which would serve to keep anybody who actually also has these abilities from also coming forward.
To my knowledge, there has never been a case of psychic abilities demonstrated under valid test conditions, nor any verifiable case of communication with the dead. Even if your logic is correct that psychic people as a rule would prefer to hide real psychic abilities (and I can see no reason why that would be the rule), that would certainly not be universally true. In the entire saga of the human race after the era of pre-history, you’d think at least one would have slipped through the cracks somewhere. But who knows? Perhaps one of these Halloweens somebody will present us with one of those coded messages Houdini left behind.
In regards to the Million Dollar Challenge, the whole thing was really just a fraud, as big a fraud as the people that James Randi wanted to expose. There are two key quotes on this:
1.James Randi is ‘an honest liar’
2.”I always have an out.”
Some of Randi’s defenders believe that the reference to him being ‘an honest liar’ is about him having previously been a professional magician, as magicians are referred to as ‘honest liars.’ However, it referred to him as a person who used dishonest methods to discredit those he thought were dishonest. This does not include his famous and very positive take-down of the charlatan Peter Popoff, but Randi made it clear he believed that the ends justified the means. (Despite Randi’s take-down of Popoff, it hardly ended up denting Popoff’s popularity which I think contributed a great deal to Randi’s ever increasing bitterness.)
2.Randi claimed that he was misquoted, that he actually said: “I always have an out: I’m right.” However, his actions make it clear that he was quoted correctly in the first place.
There were people who claimed to have paranormal abilities who wanted to take this Million Dollar Challenge, but Randi was the gate-keeper on who would take it. Randi was accused of constantly altering the tests, and then, when the seemingly more serious claimants of paranormal abilities continued to express a willingness to take the test, Randi would simply never respond with a final agreement.
This was dismissed by those in the media who dismiss paranormal claims and who didn’t believe Randi would need to do such a thing, but an email exchange between Randi and Rupert Sheldrake provided evidence those people were telling the truth.
Sheldrake is dismissed by many as a flake, and maybe he is, but he presented a claim based on ‘pre-cognition’ that pet dogs have the ability to sense when their owners are coming home. Pre-cognition is one of the paranormal claims not dismissed by current scientific theories because science itself states that linear time is a human construct.
Randi denied allowing Sheldrake to take up the Challenge as Randi claimed that his group had done tests on this and that Sheldrake’s claim failed these tests. Sheldrake demanded to see these test results. Randi at first ignored him but then later claimed ‘the test results were lost in flood caused by Hurricane Wilma.’ However, it was subsequently noticed that flood occurred four years before Sheldrake came forward to take up the challenge.
Prior to the Hurricane Wilma claim, when asked about these tests, Randi claimed to not recall having ever done any such tests, when handed the email exchange that Sheldrake had provided to the reporter, all Randi said was ‘oh.’
The sole purpose of this Million Dollar Challenge was not to prove or disprove paranormal claims, but to ‘debunk’ paranormal claims, and as with ‘debunkers’ to do so in a completely dishonest fashion. So, the Million Dollar Challenge was a big a fraud as a palm reader, but in the United States, it achieved what it set out to do: to convince people that if paranormal abilities existed, that somebody should win the challenge.
A professor of sociology named Marcello Truzzi referred to people who are quick to disbelieve paranormal claims but quick to believe things like the validity of the Million Dollar Challenge as ‘pseudo-skeptics.’ This is his 8 point checklist:
1.Denying, when only doubt has been established
2.Double standards in the application of criticism
3.The tendency to discredit rather than investigate
4.Presenting insufficient evidence or proof
5.Assuming criticism requires no burden of proof
6.Making unsubstantiated counter-claims
7.Counter-claims based on plausibility rather than empirical evidence
8.Suggesting that unconvincing evidence provides grounds for completely dismissing a claim
In contrast, this is what Truzzi said genuine skepticism entails:
1.Acceptance of doubt when neither assertion nor denial has been established
2.No burden of proof to take an agnostic position
3.Agreement that the corpus of established knowledge must be based on what is proved, but recognising its incompleteness
4.Even-handedness in requirement for proofs, whatever their implication
5.Accepting that a failure of a proof in itself proves nothing
Continuing examination of the results of experiments even when flaws are found
“Randi claimed to not recall having ever done any such tests, ”
This should say that Randi claimed to not recall he ever claimed to have done such tests. Sheldrake’s emails showed that he had made such a claim. Of course, almost certainly neither Randi or his team ever did any such tests.
Truzzi was an associate for a time with Carl Sagan and Sagan acknowledges that Truzzi was the person who introduced him to the line “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”
Truzzi however later questioned this line on the basis that ‘there is no such thing as ‘extraordinary’ evidence, there is just ordinary evidence.’
An example of this are those who claim that the increase in the amount of extreme weather events isn’t one piece of the extremely solid evidence of the reality of global warming/climate change. For instance, with the recent flooding in Ottawa, Canada, the second floods in three years, a stupid meme was posted ‘how does global warming explain the flooding in the Ottawa Valley in 1877?” There seems to be this view among global warming deniers that global warming/climate change should produce ‘extraordinary’ new weather events that have never occurred before, but of course, all it will do is produce more frequent and more extreme events of what occurred in the past.
The clearest example of a pseudo skepticism I can think of involves the people who claim to have been part of the alleged fakery of the Patterson-Gimlin bigfoot film. Again, I don’t have any opinion on whether that film is real, but essentially a person came forward and said they were the one wearing the bigfoot outfit. At this, all the pseudo-skeptics stepped forward to claim “this proves the film was a fraud!”
Except, of course, it doesn’t Anybody old enough can step forward to make such a claim. If the film is fake, there is simply no way to verify or falsify who was wearing the bigfoot outfit. A genuine skeptic would have been as skeptical of this person who came forward as they are of the film. Anybody who believed this claim is a pseudo-skeptic and not a genuine skeptic.
1.One person who claimed to have paranormal abilities and did step forward was Edgar Cayce. He was interested in using his alleged abilities to help people, but even before he started helping people, he received a great number of letters from people asking for his assistance. It stands to reason that people with real psychic abilities (or who believe they have real psychic abilities) would fear being harassed. This is certainly the scenario that many fiction writers present as well: Twilight Zone episodes and in their comic books and so on.
2.There have been people who have come forward, and they are dismissed by most. This is a circular argument: the people who come forward who claim they have psychic abilities are dismissed. Therefore, no person who has psychic abilities has ever stepped forward.
3.’Valid test conditions’ is a much more recent ability. The statistical maths have only existed for about 200 years and the scientific technology required to test many of these claims for even a much shorter period of time. Since this, there have been claims and counter-claims. At one point around 2010-2012, it looked like it had been shown that tests on pre-cognition provided statistically significant evidence of its existence, but then others took a look at the math and found possible errors.
Is there something of that nature that is the subject of scientific scrutiny, with results being published in a peer-reviewed science journal?
I know there are some example of powers of the mind that ordinary people do not possess, like eidetic memory, or the ability to reproduce complex music after a single listening. But these alternate forms of processing don’t equate to anything paranormal. As far as I know, nobody has ever retrieved info from a dead person that only that person could have known (ala Houdini’s challenge). As far as I know, nobody can predict lottery numbers. Etc.
As for your circular argument, it is not circular at all. It is self-contradictory. “People who come forward who claim they have psychic abilities are dismissed. Therefore, no person who has psychic abilities has ever stepped forward.”
1) If the people who were dismissed were charlatans, people who might have real psychic abilities can see that they were dismissed because they were charlatans, and the fact of their dismissal should raise no barrier to coming forward with legitimate powers which could be demonstrated.
2) And there’s no other option available in the premise. The people who were dismissed had to be charlatans because the second part of the syllogism says that no person who has psychic abilities has ever stepped forward.
On Fox News…”ignorance is our strength”