Parnormal Stuff and Things *Insert X Files theme here.*

Hello everyone. This is a topic that kind of interests me. I've watched videos and shows on this topic. Has anyone had an encounter with the supernatural? Like a ghost, a spirit, an angel, or a demon, anything? Would you say that is changed you? If not, do you believe stuff like that is out there? Maybe I've been watch too many Ghost Adventures. Yeah, weird I know especially considering how many people say that show is completely fake. I know everyone could be right about it but something about that show sucks me in.

I uhmmm... Haven't actually myself but I am curious. I do believe there are weird things out there that can't simply be explained by science. It's ignorant and arrogant to say that science has discovered everything. Discuss!

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Originally posted by Froody Blue Gem

Hello everyone. This is a topic that kind of interests me. I've watched videos and shows on this topic. Has anyone had an encounter with the supernatural? Like a ghost, a spirit, an angel, or a demon, anything? Would you say that is changed you? If not, do you believe stuff like that is out there? Maybe I've been watch too many Ghost Adventures. Yeah, weird I know especially considering how many people say that show is completely fake. I know everyone could be right about it but something about that show sucks me in.

I uhmmm... Haven't actually myself but I am curious. I do believe there are weird things out there that can't simply be explained by science. It's ignorant and arrogant to say that science has discovered everything. Discuss!

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Actually, yes.

I think I'm a pretty reasonable person, and I don't "really" believe in any of that stuff.

It's an odd artifact of my mother's side of the family — there's a lot of cultural things that accumulated over time and were passed down by word of mouth.

So, yes, a good part of me still is superstitious.

One bad side effect is that, as a young child, I had pretty bad "night terrors." That was at a young age, I don't know 3-7 or so? I'd read things in the newspaper about a tiger killing a small child in NE India, and, obviously, I'd start to imagine things.

Yeah, I'm not exactly "proud to say," but I'm very much more superstitious than I should be.

It's like my relationship with the Church — I obviously don't "believe," but I believe that there are experiences which are so perplexing that I believe that I believe that my belief is not without merit.

In short, yeah, basically, I can still convince myself in the veridicality of what phenomena I encounter: and some of it is pretty weird. It happens in dreams, or in waking dreams.

So, yeah, even though I know things, and what aren't things, I also don't know, so I take "ghost stories" pretty seriously.

Ummm......that's probably a good thing to think about.

I'm, of course, thinking about the language games as conceived and thought through.

What do we do or mean when we say one is "convinced"?

We don't really think about "being convinced," when confronted: instead, we're certain in the same way that being burned by a flame is momentarily indelible.

I suppose that "being convinced" is about the same language as "being certain":

I suppose, after an hour or so of not-thinking about it, that "reducing" problems to a grammatical form is not, really, an unreasonable way to go about things.

So, we have that the "problem" can be stated, and can be stated in atomic terms, and, what's more, we have that there are categories or "family resemblances" that can still be more-or-less captured by the terms of formal ontology.

And then we have a lot of other things, which can be or are to be inspected.

And so we're stuck with the old "linkage problem."

Well, it's, IMHO, too bad that "true believers" in fields of cognition, computer engineering, don't see this as a challenge, but rather as a threat to the broadly-materialist worldview to which any reasonable, mainstream thinker adheres.

Instead of looking to results in ecology, robotics, and formal ontology, some foundering idiots are looking to crude physicalist models and statistical crap-shoots.

AND, yeah, of course ghosts and shit are a bunch of bullshit.

BUT, I'm still scared of a good ghost story. Genuinely scared, sometimes. That's probably why it's not so good to leave the house during autumn through spring! Old habits die hard.

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Originally posted by Jizzelbin

Instead of looking to results in ecology, robotics, and formal ontology, some foundering idiots are looking to crude physicalist models and statistical crap-shoots.

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And, if, as I suspect, I wasn't too plain about what I meant, that's why we have all that bullshit about self-driving cars and people still bleat on and on about neural networking as a model of cognition.

And that's why we can't have nice things.

I didn't make all of my reasoning clear, but just included the highlights.