I had a long-winded conversation about this before here.
>>/ot/36147
>>/ot/36171
>>/ot/36180
Edit: It's kind of nice and scary at the same time that I can reference my old posts instead of writing new ones.

Post edited on 16th Apr 2021, 2:56pm

Responding to >>/ot/38132
I've always thought it a bit strange that those who use the infallibility of our physical senses as an argument for the non-material seem to be fine believing in their own intuition as evidence for that. I agree that our senses are the only way we can interact the world and hence it might all be one big sensory illusion, but if you're going to deny that – which is at least something that has consensus from others – then what makes trusting in your own "intuition" any better?

>>1273
I've been a practicing occultist for well over a decade, and while I've seen, heard, etc. much more, there's also things that are simply too weird to be coincidences and that happened physically.
The most striking physical phenomena was when I summoned a certain spirit in the room where the bottom of my chimney is, and it didn't go great. The chimney cleaners came by a while later and found dozens - about 1 meter worth - of bird corpses in my unused chimney, all of which dove in head-first, apparently hard enough to die on impact (since I never heard any bird cries). That's not normal. The guy had never seen something like that.
I've rituals that had the intended effect. To be fair, they could be explained by coincidences, but not all of them at once since I don't do rituals unless something is unlikely to happen without one.
I've done divination and it works about 80-90% of the time (note that real divination isn't horoscopes, it's quite specific - pic related is a short extract of one). I use dowsing to help my family find lost items - items I've never seen before with no way to actually know where they are and I'm usually within 1m of the spot, on large farms, not tiny apartments. Once or twice could be explained by coincidence, but not dozens of times.
In my experience, magick works if theory is properly followed and the person doing it has adequate training and the proper mindset. It's not infallible, and some things just can't be done, but in general it works. If something works, I look for applications, not so much explanations since any explanation is inevitably going to be flawed since it'd have to encompass the All in its entirety, which a human mind cannot comprehend. So at best it's a shadow of one angle of Truth.

That being said, yes, I believe in one All-God, multiple gods (some might call them angels), reincarnation under some set of circumstances, astral bodies, and the Oneness of all (which logically follows from One God). Partially because of what I have experienced, partially because it helped me to be able to experience it.

> most (all?) non-material phenomenon seem to implicitly mark humans as "different" from things like rocks or insects and this seems apriori unlikely.
That's a relatively new belief. In older texts for example, you can find people thinking of metal as a lesser order of living thing, along with plants and animals, with humans just being the latest stage of development of the outpouring and upwards striving of creation. One relatively recent remnant of this is in Celtic countries and Iceland, where fairies and nature spirits are still said to inhabit places, much like a human may have some kind of guardian spirit.

>>1293
Have you ever heard of James Randi?

>>1297
He was the reason I included
>proper mindset. It's not infallible, and some things just can't be done
Randi asks a lot of things that go against the basic theory of magick, then, should someone somehow manage to produce results, he changes the method until it's turned even more against a practitioner because he "knows" that magick doesn't exist and therefore if something where to show that it does, then the methodology must've been flawed.
That aside, it's not a circus show.
Best I can tell you, if you want proof, practice on your own and in a year or two you'll be able to prove it to yourself.

>>1300
>Randi asks a lot of things that go against the basic theory of magick
Do you think a lot of the people he tested were charlatans, but some of them were legitimate and his testing methods were flawed? What's the most basic, easy form of magick?

>>1301
Most, if not all, of them were probably charlatans due to self-sorting for attention whores and money-grubbers.
The most basic form is moving energy within your body, which can do basic things like influencing your mood to completely change your mood to very advanced things like quicker healing. Changing your mood sounds less impressive than the experience of it happening in a few seconds is.
Other than that, it mainly depends on what you're well suited to, those rituals are the first to work, and the rest needs more practice.

>>1302
>which can do basic things like influencing your mood to completely change your mood to very advanced things like quicker healing
I do some forms of meditation which involve "energy work" (microcosmic orbit) and while I believe in these effects (influencing mood and reducing the sense of pain), I still remain skeptical that this is due to the "moving energy" in particular rather than the general effects of stilling the mind/meditating. That is to say, to explain these effects you don't need to invoke the notion of any extra-material "energy."

In particular, I do actually feel certain "energy" when I go into the meditative state, and it corroborates perfectly with what others describe. So at the very least proper meditation can result in interesting sensations.

I suppose I'm not at the level to manifest anything outside my body – now that would be convincing. I used to be more convinced of the potential for this because I once recall that someone showed me "healing crystals" and when he pointed one at my palm I could feel a very strong "pressure." And when he moved the crystal up and down I could feel "waves" of some kind of pressure. But then later on I discovered asmr and while not as intense as that original experience, the feeling of those "pressure waves" is very similar – so this was clearly an effect produced by the body itself rather than some "energy transfer."

>>1304
If you can already do that much, then attempt the following: Feel how the energy of your body feels with different moods, happy, sad, etc. Remember it well.
Then, move energy as needed to reproduce that feeling when you're in a different mood. It helps to also feel energy outside of your body, so do that if you can't manage it, and then start breathing it in as needed (elemental, so Earth = cold and dry, water = cold and wet, air = warm and wet, fire = warm and dry, each with its respective colors). Get good at it and you can change your mood utterly within a single breath anywhere, supermarket, bank, sidewalk doesn't matter. Being able to do that, next comes feeling the energy within other people, a good place to train would be trains or buses, where you sit close to others for prolonged periods. Just pretend to sleep when you meditate. It won't work for everyone, some people unconsciously put up barriers. Then you can just go from there.

>>1302
Changing mood like that has nothing to do with magic. Our brain is full of chemicals that alter mood and there are many ways to utilise that, plus therapeutic exercises can alter mood as can many other things, nobody would say taking a deep breath and patting your dog for a bit was magic yet it has the effect you describe.

The few astral projection communities online are retarded beyond belief. Basically anything of the likes of robert monroe and tom campbell are absolute authority there and are rarely questioned. After researching to me they look like slightly more sophisticated than average charlatans.
In these communities when questioned as to why there's no serious experiments done on it, there's generally just people avoiding the question at all costs possible or even straight up lying, or the classic "doing it yourself is the only possible way of proving it".
I'm fairly sure a large part of these communities have an incentive to direct people to the (spoonbending)monroe institute.
Even though I'm inclined to believe that supernatural states(like astral projection) could be reached with consciousness, looking at the people talking about it online is seriously dismaying.

Post edited on 5th May 2021, 1:38pm

>>1315
Even if full-on remote viewing isn't possible, if the claims behind reiki/remote energy transfer are true, then someone should be able to set up an experiment to see if 1 bit of information (whether that person is "sending energy") can be communicated (i.e. with probability great than 50%, since then you can always just use error correction to amplify).

>>1316
The scientific method blocks chi flow. As soon as any kind of empiricism gets involved, chi dries up like a lilypad in the desert. That's why testing energy magic is completely impossible. The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence though, so just take people's word for it.

Post edited on 5th May 2021, 6:52pm

>>1316
It would be so easy too, with the kind of money a lot of these people, organizations and institutes get. But no, why do a credible demonstration, lets make another expensive workshop instead and some books too while we are at it.
>>1317
Actually the "scientists" that try and study this phenomenon are in reality advanced wizards that block every attempt of the participants.

Post edited on 5th May 2021, 7:29pm

>>1318
In all seriousness, if psychic powers or astral projection were possible, it would certainly be used by the military. You can say it takes a lot of work and effort, but that would make it fit military usage even more. And these gurus, who are clearly motivated by profit, would instruct the military on how to do if they actually could. The only explanation is if the military is hiding their psychic troops, which is getting into nutbar territory.

>>1319
The CIA (or one of the three letter agencies) studied this under project stargazer during the soviet era, but the results appeared to be negative (or maybe that's what they want you to think).

>>1320
I've heard of that before. Wonder if any other government took a crack at it, or if the US's is the only one goofy enough to try.

>>1321
You can bet the soviets did as well [1], and that's probably why the CIA started their own program "we must not allow a mind-reading gap?" I wonder if that submarine experiment can be recreated (disregarding ethics).

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/apr/18/superhuman-sport-cold-war-mind-power-men-on-magic-carpets-ed-hawkins-extract

>>1318
I suppose to be slightly fair to the other side, it's not just a matter of doing the experiment but doing it with a credible witness. And finding someone who's both considered credible and would be willing to stake their reputation on such a thing might be difficult. There's the Randi challenge, but the last time I looked at that he came off as a bit of an ass, randomly changing terms in the middle [2, 3] (if there's an underlying reason for his withdrawal he doesn't seem to state one); I guess trying to entertain every charlatan would be exhausting, but if he was genuinely interested in discovering answers rather than being the figurehead of the skeptic-sphere then this comes off badly.

[2] http://archive.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/235-george-vithoulkas-homeopathy-challenge-starting-anew.html
[3] https://www.vithoulkas.com/research/clinical-trial-randi

>>1323
>it's not just a matter of doing the experiment but doing it with a credible witness
Most don't even attempt to get challenged or tested, they are very reserved and defensive. Even if the randi challenge didn't exist the lack of motivation to do demonstrations and tests would still be astounding, real discoveries spread faster than this even without the internet.
As for the randi thing: I don't know if he was dishonest with his testing, I do know that if your income depended on it, you'd have to claim that he was dishonest if you failed to meet the standards for the challenge.
I don't know what transpired between these two, vithoulkas seems to assume bad faith on behalf of randi. The "Another Withdrawal" thing could just have been a mistake and it was corrected with an apology: http://archive.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/174-swift-march-14-2008.html#i2
As we can not get the whole story now, the important part is that it ends by saying they would complete the experiment with Hrasko Gabor as a witness. Where is that? Gabor still seems to be against homeopathy many years later and I cannot find the experiment. What happened?

>>1324
Thanks for that follow up, for some reason I didn't find that. Still bit of a mystery what actually transpired since both parties claim the other one withdrew. And yet both parties end with a mention that the experiment would continue anyway, but there doesn't seem to be any follow up.

There have been some other RCTs, but all of them take the indirect approach of trying to compare the effectiveness versus a placebo for some non-distinct symptom like depression [1] or ADHD [2]. These are basically useless since the diagnosis is itself a subjective issue and probably could changes day-to-day, so you could easily get lucky on the day of the follow-up evaluation and find the treatment group did better than control (indeed, the effectiveness of conventional antidepressants is probably also questionable for this reason).

The protocol that seemed to been established for the Randi thing appeared to be a bit more solid
>An individualized remedy would be given to a number of patients in a double blind fashion and half of the patients would receive placebo the other half would get the real remedy. The Greek Homeopathic physicians that would participate in taking of the cases and prescribing the remedies should point out in the end of the experiment the ones that they had got the real remedy.

in that it shifts the criteria of success to something easily quantitatively verifiable (did the person do significantly better than guessing), but I wish they could have at least published the entire protocol for someone else to try since the definition of "point out" seems a bit vague (will they have access to the patients' reported symptoms for the days after treatment?) and the condition for selection of patients isn't provided. Maybe they meant this as a test of the concept of homeopathic "proving" [3] where a given remedy in ultra-high dilutions is supposed to reliably elicit "characteristic" symptoms?

[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0118440
[2] https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT02086864
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathy#Provings_2

>>1337
I think that the fact that they have to resort to something as vague as ADHD and depression in order to even attempt to find an effect says a lot, they can keep researching forever.
My main issue is that the charlatans know that they have no ground to stand on, and yet keep going.
Look at these "science papers" from this vithoulkas site
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/336922928_The_controversy_over_the_Memory_of_Water_Med_Sci_Hypotheses_2017_41-6
https://medandlife.org/all-issues/2020/issue-3-2020/review-issue-3-2020/the-spin-of-electrons-and-the-proof-for-the-action-of-homeopathic-remedies/
These on the surface look like research papers, but compare them to anything actually talking about electron spin or molecular memory and the difference is clear.
You don't do this kind of mockery unless you are trying to actively deceive people.

>>1342
Yeah that vithoulkas guy is quacky in his own right (there are some quotes about him mentioning how aids is caused by overuse of antibiotics). Trying to come up with explanations by throwing out random theories that abuse quantum mechanics just alienates everyone else from even bothering with their claims (after "water memory" failed, it seems they've moved on to quantum mechanics, nanoparticles, and whatever).

At this point they've probably exhausted any good will, so if there is indeed any validity to be had behind claims of homeopathy working in any form, the onus is on them to arrange and fund a proper experiment.

>>1262
theres no belief needed for non-material phenomenon, its scientifically proven. theres light, magnetism, gravity, and instantaneous action at a distance, but since most of you know about these and still dont "believe" in non-material phenomenon ill give an example. lets say the universe is small and has 2 particles that a separated. they have seemingly no input to tell them another particle even exists yet the both attract towards each other due to gravity. there was undeniably something non-material involved in this process.

i think the most obvious example however is light. people will say light is a wave and a particle however this is wrong. as far as i know theres only one phenomenon that could be twisted to justify this and its the photoelectric effect. essentially an electric current can be induced in something by a high frequency light however no matter how much low frequency light you shoot at that thing it will not produce a current. this directly points to light not being a particle because if this phenomenon could be explained by particles then simply shooting more particles would produce the current, however this is not the case. so with that out of the way we know that light is a wave and all waves are just vibrations of something. that something is the ether and it is the basis for all non-material phenomenon.

>>1353
> its scientifically proven
One doesn't "prove" anything with the scientific method, you can only disprove things. At best you can say there's a strong body of evidence that lends itself to a claim, but the claim could always be disproved later on by other experiments.

> light, magnetism, gravity, and instantaneous action at a distance
Information propagation is limited by speed of light, and "spooky action at a distance" isn't sufficient to transmit information.

>to tell them another particle even exists yet the both attract towards each other due to gravity. there was undeniably something non-material involved in this process
Under classical theory, the interaction is mediated by the {graviational, electric} field. Now you could question why exactly this electric force arises, and you could try to shift the problem one level deeper by brining in quantum mechanics, but yes ultimately the fact that this works is just based on experiments and we write the theory to accord with that. I don't think this should be classified as non-material phenomenon because by defition the observed effects are influenced and registerd by material substances. (Put two magnets together, they attract/repel. On the flipside, non-material phenomenon are strictly those which we cannot physically register, yet people claim to be "cognizant" of. The paradox is of course that if we could register these then they would no longer be non-material – and it would probably spawn new areas of research!)

>light is a wave and a particle however this is wrong.
It's neither. That is to say, it's its own separate thing which happens to share some particular properties of both things. I've only a laymans understanding here though, but as far as I know it's best modeled as a wave-function (complex amplitudes spread across space) which upon measurement is localized to a point. (Of course there's other formalisms of QM such as bohmian mechanics).

> that something is the ether and it is the basis for all non-material phenomenon.
The michelson morley experiment showed that there can't be a physical aether which is a universal rest frame (e.g. just like air is a rest frame for sound waves). The EM and various other fields are only "like" an aether in that they mediates forces, but it obeys lorentz symmetries. The fact that it's not a universal rest frame implies that this isn't a physical medium enveloping all of space.

>>1354
>the observed effects are influenced and registerd by material substances. (Put two magnets together, they attract/repel. On the flipside, non-material phenomenon are strictly those which we cannot physically register, yet people claim to be "cognizant" of.
This.

>>1354
>The michelson morley experiment showed that there can't be a physical aether
who ever said it was physical? the point is that the ether is non-physical, encompasses everything, is everything, and has always existed. anyway the michelson morley experiment was an attempt to measure the velocity of earth by measuring the difference of speeds between two beams of light. the results showed that there was not enough difference in speed to justify the idea of a moving earth however there was a little difference. since the results could not justify the earth moving at the speeds we once thought it did i think its safe to assume the earth isnt moving at all. if we assume the earth isnt moving at all then the small difference that was shown could be used to justify the existence of an ether wind, however even if there isnt wind in the ether it doesnt necessarily mean it doesnt exist.

from my understanding scientists didnt like the idea that the earth wasnt moving so they discarded the ether and proceeded to make up random bullshit in order to balance out equations to justify the idea that the earth is moving.

>On the flipside, non-material phenomenon are strictly those which we cannot physically register, yet people claim to be "cognizant" of
the mechanics of two psychics talking to each other with their minds are identical to that of two magnets moving each other yet why should they be classified differently? there isnt a single interpretation of the universe that can work without some immaterial aspect to it, why not just accept it? on top of that, do you not consider praying for something then getting it a non-material phenomenon?

>it's its own separate thing which happens to share some particular properties of both things
again if you missed it the first time, no experiment has ever shown light exhibiting properties of a particle. it was a laughably wrong interpretation of the photoeletric effect which spawned this idea of a wave particle duality.

>>1356
>if we assume the earth isnt moving at all
Are you saying that the sun orbits around the earth then?

>make up random bullshit
I'm trying to take you in good faith but you're squandering it by characterizing things as "random bullshit" when they're systemtically derived from fundamental principles which we have observed empirically to be true. If you want to invoke the aether, then what would explain lorentz invariance?

>two psychics talking to each other with their minds are identical to that of two magnets moving each other
If you can reliably reproduce this, then sure. But so far no one has been able to demonstrate in a controlled environment that they can do so.

>no experiment has ever shown light exhibiting properties of a particle. it was a laughably wrong interpretation of the photoeletric effect which spawned this idea of a wave particle duality.
I'm not sure what you're arguing against. As I've said, no one except laypeople believe that "wave particle duality" means that it's sometimes a particle/sometimes a wave. The canonical interpretation as a wave-function shows how the localized/non-localized aspects arise.

>no matter how much low frequency light you shoot at that thing it will not produce a current. this directly points to light not being a particle because if this phenomenon could be explained by particles then simply shooting more particles would produce the current

Why do you say that? A physical analogue would be activation energy. Or if you want a mechanical analogue, dynamical systems exhibit bifurcations which can be loosely interpreted as requiring a high enough "energy" for a state change to visibly occur.

And if you don't like the photoelectric effect there's also compton scattering.

>>1361
>Are you saying that the sun orbits around the earth then?
i would say thats the next best thing now that heliocentrism is out of the way.

>If you want to invoke the aether, then what would explain lorentz invariance?
honestly i had no idea what lorentz invariance was until i read about it a few minutes ago, from my understanding it means the laws of the universe dont change no matter where you are. if i do have this right then i think it would be you that has to explain how lorentz invariance exists without any underlying fabric on the universe. the ether easily explains it because everything is the ether and therefore everything is bound by its laws. without an ether, what is stopping something from not following the laws of physics or even leaving the universe altogether?

btw the random bullshit i was talking about was lorentz contraction, which to my knowledge was invented solely to account for the failure of the michelson morley experiment.

>If you can reliably reproduce this, then sure
i mean in principle how psychic communication and magnets work are the same. hypothetically if it did exist then it would work through the same medium magnets do, so its nonsensical to classify magnets in a different domain.

>I'm not sure what you're arguing against
what im trying to do is show that there is something non-material enveloping the whole universe that would be the foundation for all other types of non-material phenomenon.

>>1362
>A physical analogue would be activation energy. Or if you want a mechanical analogue, dynamical systems exhibit bifurcations which can be loosely interpreted as requiring a high enough "energy" for a state change to visibly occur
yes and if the "activation energy" in the photoelectric effect was due to a particle-like phenomenon then the frequency of the light would not matter. you could have two beams of light, one high frequency and one low frequency but having much more energy than the high frequency one, and still only the high frequency light will be able to produce the photoelectric effect.

>>1363
>now that heliocentrism is out of the way.
This is opening up a whole new can of worms – if you reject heliocentrism then the assumptions we're working under are so radically different that it's not going to be productive to continue this line of discussion. (You'd have to go back to epicycles to explain orbits, let alone the tangible evidence from telescopes)

>>1363
I think it'd be prudent to at least understand a bit more about SR (and GR) before dismissing ideas outright. And if you dismiss lorentz contraction then you're implicitly dismissing time dilation which we know is experimentally true given the correction factors needed for GPS.

>and one low frequency but having much more energy than the high frequency one
Please lookup the planck equation.

>>1364
>Please lookup the planck equation.
i think you misunderstood me, i know high frequency means more energy. i guess what im trying to say is you can have a high amplitude low frequency beam of light that doesnt produce the photoelectric effect, meanwhile a low amplitude high frequecy beam of light will produce it.

>if you reject heliocentrism then the assumptions we're working under are so radically different that it's not going to be productive to continue this line of discussion
it is much easier to just accept the results that the michelson morley experiment showed than to claim that distance contracts in order to explain why the motion of the earth cant be detected.

>I think it'd be prudent to at least understand a bit more about SR (and GR) before dismissing ideas outright
it would be

>>1366
>you can have a high amplitude low frequency beam of light that doesnt produce the photoelectric effect, meanwhile a low amplitude high frequecy beam of light will produce it.
Yes, what's wrong with that. There's a thresholding effect depending on frequency, and amplitude (square of which roughly corresponds to intensity) determines the current. Wave-particle "duality" is a pop-sci "meme" as it were, there is only the wavefunction and its evolution through time. Trying to say it behaves "like a classical particle" or "like a classical wave" is just as wrong as saying that sound is caused by something invisible like air but is caused by ripples like watter so sound exhibits "air-water" duality. Under the modern field theory interpretation I believes photons are nothing but what we call excitations of the EM field. And quantization is a result of an effect similar to how classical standing waves are constrained to multiples of the base harmonic.