Message #3346

[Martin]

I asked you if you had ever predicted anything - the correct answer in your case would be 'no' - rather than making what you must believe to be a rather witty comment about the last thread.

No. The correct answer would be that everyone predicts things. I did choose an answer showing a vague ammusement, but I wasn't taking the ****, my answer was serious one. We all have the power to predict things. You may be talking about predicitng something that you couldn't possibly have known. But when open-minded, critical people look at the great and famous predictors like say Nostradamus or Mother Shipton they find many predictions that haven't come to pass and others that are written in such non-specific terms that provide a sort of catch-all for events. Looked at statistically they aren't remarkable, though they can be made to seem so by those who wish to report them selectively. You report things selectively - you've demonstrated that here, so, at least in that sense, you fit the category of someone whose claims should be treated with suspicion.  I'm not trying to be nasty towards you.  I'm telling you the good reasons why an open-minded person should not put their trust in your claims.

There might be Martin - how do you know for sure it isn't?  There might be other things going on with the people concerned to do with their condition. My mental health is fine -  and no chemical imbalances in the brain apart from the odd migraine here and there. The voices are not there all the time (thankfully) - I think that would drive me insane.

Far more to the point, how do you know your observations are not to do with the chemistry of your brain?  How can you eliminate the obvious explanation and propose one with no detectable mechanism?  It's extremely common for people to hear voices, some have other psychiatric conditions, others don't.  Some people are more suggestible than others.  The point is, that, because we know that the brain influences such things, then, unless and until you can test these things properly, under controled conditions, and show that it cannot be a result of the brain, it is far more reasonable to expect that voices in the head are caused by the action of the brain rather than by some exterior personality.

If I wire up a light bulb and switch it on I can demonstrate that when the switch is pressed the light comes on because of the electric current flowing through it.  If I encounter another light bulb that's already on, but I don't have access to the switch, the wires or the fusebox, then it's reasonable for me to assume that a similar process is in operation. It's far less reasonable for me to assume that this light bulb is being lit by undetectable telepathic energy from a group of little green men on Mars! It's so much less reasonable to assume such a thing, that nobody with an ounce of balance would even propose it, let alone believe it. Anyone asking "how do you know for sure that it isn't lit by little green men in a sceance on Mars", is missing the obvious point.  In your case you're deliberately avoiding that point, though I make it again and again. That's one of the reasons why I say you are demonstrating a closed-minded selectivity in your claims. 

Put concisely, it's absurd to propose that an event is cause by an invisible, undetectable, unmeasurable form of energy, for which, numerous attempts to prove its existence have proved fruitless, when there is a perfectly good sientifically demonstrable and detectable explanation for similar events elsewhere.