Edmund Storms wrote:
While I agree that people can suffer from hallucinations and false
memory, this explanation must not and is not used to explain all
strange experiences.
I am not familiar with the dataset of modern strange experiences, or
the radar and physical evidence. But I am 100% sure that delusions
and lies can account for all pre-modern experiences such as
witchcraft, faith-healing, miracles, superstitions and the like.
These things were extremely widespread -- much more widespread than
abduction reports -- but they were all physically impossible and plainly wrong.
This is particularly obvious to people outside a given culture. For
example, Japanese folk beliefs, modern superstitions and religions
seem preposterous to Americans, and vice versa. Try explaining to a
modern educated Japanese person what the Catholic rite of
transubstantiation is all about and you will see. He will eventually
realize you are talking about ritualistic cannibalism, and he will be
grossed out and appalled. Purely ritualistic cannibalism is common in
many cultures, and you can find examples in any anthropology
textbook. But I don't recall any examples in East Asian culture so
they are unused to the idea.
(Actual, peaceful, non-threatening cannibalism is also fairly
widespread and still practiced, by the way. Typically, people eat a
few ashes from the cremated dead person. Public health authorities
are trying to encourage this in lieu of eating human brains at
funerals, which spreads Creuzfeldt-Jakob disease. And if that grosses
you out, now you know how a Japanese visitor to a Catholic church
feels! In Japan, the ancestors eat a little of your food before
supper, but you never eat your ancestors.)
Society uses personal experience as a basis for judging reality with
reasonable success, including yourself Jed.
Not me! I use notes and photographs. I learned to write everything
down at a tender age. As I said, my mother taught me a hundred ways
that memory can and will deceive you. Memory is a lovely thing, but fiction.
Otherwise you would have no opinions you would wish to share because
they all could be pure imagination.
Not at all! As Francis Bacon said:
"[W]e are not to deny the authority of the human senses and
understanding, although weak; but rather to furnish them with
assistance" (with instruments and experiments).
Bacon's book "Novum Organum" is largely devoted to the problems,
weakness and delusions of the human senses, which he calls "idols of
the mind" and the methods by which science can overcome them. Modern
people still have not learned many of the lessons he teaches. See
apothegms 20 through 60, for example:
"The human understanding is most excited by that which strikes and
enters the mind at once and suddenly, and by which the imagination is
immediately filled and inflated. . . .
The human understanding is active and cannot halt or rest, but even,
though without effect, still presses forward. . . .
The human understanding resembles not a dry light, but admits a
tincture of the will and passions, which generate their own system
accordingly: for man always believes more readily that which he prefers.
But by far the greatest impediment and aberration of the human
understanding proceeds from the dulness, incompetency, and errors of
the senses . . .
The human understanding is, by its own nature, prone to abstraction,
and supposes that which is fluctuating to be fixed. . . ."
In the case of the UFO experience, the shared experience is overwhelming.
If UFOs are delusions, we would expect the delusion to be shared
(stereotyped) and widespread. That's why so many people used to
imagine they saw witches flying on brooms.
Like cold fusion, eventually the evidence overwhelms any skeptical argument.
Eyewitness reports are not evidence. There may be other kinds of
evidence I have not heard of, but eyewitness reports are meaningless.
Millions of people in the U.S. think they have undergone various
impossible experiences, usually stereotypical. That tells you a great
deal about the human brain and nothing about reality.
The evidence for cold fusion is data recorded by instruments. If it
were only eyewitness reports I would not believe a word of it.
I would have some difficulty believing Mizuno's report of the massive
heat-after-death event if I had not seen the actual bucket, the cell,
and the thermocouple pen-recorder trace from before he put the cell
in the bucket. I still have difficulty believing Fleischmann & Pons
description of the explosion in February 1985. Why they did not
preserve physical evidence I shall never understand. I berated Martin
for that! It seems highly unprofessional to me. He ruefully admitted
that he should have preserved the evidence.
- Jed
