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Post by tamrin on Sept 1, 2011 9:13:51 GMT 9.5
.....the skepticism expressed concerns special knowledge claims about extra-terrestrial life-forms, especially specific claims of extra-terrestrial visits to Earth and, more especially, close encounters of the absurd kind, e.g., "alien abductions". So will you state the proposition that you support?
Then we can consider what evidence might be available for and against.While I support the general likelihood of there being extra-terrestrial life, the proposition I support with regard to particular special knowledge claims concerning such life-forms is what you have called the "null hypothesis," unless and until evidence is provided which can withstand rational scrutiny.
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Post by paul on Sept 1, 2011 9:55:18 GMT 9.5
So it is correct to state that you consider:
- intelligent life exists beyond the Earth but it has not visited or if it has it did not and does not do anything that humans could detect.
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Post by tamrin on Sept 1, 2011 10:21:27 GMT 9.5
So it is correct to state that you consider:
- intelligent life exists beyond the Earth but it has not visited or if it has it did not and does not do anything that humans could detect. This is incorrect as it goes beyond the "null hypothesis" in positively ruling out a possibility. My position is that related special knowledge claims have thus far, in my experience, not withstood rational scrutiny. The difference is akin to that between an agnostic and an atheist.
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Post by paul on Sept 1, 2011 10:30:23 GMT 9.5
Are you able to provide a statement of your position that is conducive to testing?
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Post by tamrin on Sept 1, 2011 13:44:35 GMT 9.5
Are you able to provide a statement of your position that is conducive to testing? You repeatedly ask this type of question, as though it make an absurd position somehow rational (it doesn't). The test in this case is for you to try to fallisify my already amply stated position ("null hypothesis") by providing extraordinary evidence for an alternative proposition, which will withstand rational scrutiny.
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Post by paul on Sept 1, 2011 13:52:11 GMT 9.5
Will you state your null hypothesis - just so we have an agreed starting point?
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Post by tamrin on Sept 1, 2011 14:38:44 GMT 9.5
Will you state your null hypothesis - just so we have an agreed starting point? Good grief! Will you please state an alternative hypothesis explaining actual, physical alien abductions and back it with credible, concrete evidence. My "null hypothesis" is that no such positive hypothesis and evidence exists as yet.
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Post by tamrin on Sept 1, 2011 14:57:20 GMT 9.5
I am just glad that I am not your wife or son who one day had such an experience Tamrin. Stewart now imagines Tamrin shuddering at the thought of me being his son ;D Often a delusional person will be humoured, however I am an advocate of the school of thought which recommends firmly avoiding giving any credence to delusions and fantasies (in my experience the eventual outcomes tend to be happier for all concerned).
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Post by paul on Sept 1, 2011 15:02:27 GMT 9.5
Of course the really scary thing is that alien contact and abduction does occur very frequently and that those who report it are often medicated and institutionalised until they cease such reports.
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Post by tamrin on Sept 1, 2011 15:05:05 GMT 9.5
Of course the really scary thing is that alien contact and abduction does occur very frequently and that those who report it are often medicated and institutionalised until they cease such reports. What is your specific evidence for even one such occurrence of alien contact or abduction?
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Post by paul on Sept 1, 2011 15:05:56 GMT 9.5
I had better not give any eye witness account in the presence of a psychiatrist.
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Post by tamrin on Sept 1, 2011 15:51:45 GMT 9.5
I really, really think you need to do so.
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Post by Henka on Sept 1, 2011 16:14:07 GMT 9.5
shared cultural delusions Those who claim to have been abducted by aliens may be neither crazy nor telling the truth. It might be better to think of them as sharing a cultural delusion. They are similar to the people who have near-death experiences of going down the dark tunnel to the bright light, or who see Jesus beckoning to them. These shared experiences do not prove that the experiences were not fantasies. They are likely due to similar brain states in the near-death experience, and similar life experiences and death expectations. The alternatives are not either that they are totally crazy or that they really did die, go to another world, and return to life. There is a naturalistic explanation in terms of brain states and shared cultural beliefs. Alien abductees might also be seen as similar to mystics. Both believe they have experienced something denied to the rest of us. The only evidence for their experience is their belief that it happened and the account they give of it. There is no other evidence. The comparison of abductees to mystics is not as farfetched as it might at first seem. The accounts of mystical experiences fall into two basic categories: the ecstatic and the contemplative. Each type of mysticism has its history of anecdotes and testimonials. Like the stories of abductees, the stories of each type of mystic are very similar. Ecstatic mystics tend to describe their indescribable experiences in terms clearly analogous to sexual ecstasy. Going from darkness into the light recalls the birth experience. The contemplative mystics describe their experience of perfect peace and bliss in ways which are reminiscent of a good night's sleep. In the more advanced stages of mysticism, the experience is clearly analogous to death: a state of total unity, i.e., no diversity, no change, no anything. In short, the fact that mystical experiences are described in similar ways by mystics born in different countries and in different centuries is not evidence of the authenticity of their experiences. The similarity speaks more to the uniformity of human experience. Every culture knows of birth, sex and death. Abductees are very much analogous not only to mystics, but to medieval nuns who believed they'd been seduced by devils, to ancient Greek women who thought they'd had sex with animals, and to women who believed they were witches. The abductees’ counselors and therapists are like the priests of old who do not challenge delusional beliefs, but encourage and nurture them. They do everything in their power to establish their stories as orthodox. It will be very hard to find an abductee who has not been heavily influenced in their belief by reading stories of aliens, or books like Strieber’s Communion or Intruders, or by seeing movies featuring aliens. It will be even more difficult to find an abductee who has not been greatly encouraged in their delusion by a counselor like Hopkins or a therapist like Mack. Given a great deal of encouragement by a believing community, and reinforced by the high priests of the alien abduction cult, it is not very difficult to understand why there are so many people today who believe they have been abducted by aliens. Yet, if there are beings clever enough to travel around the universe today, there probably were some equally intelligent beings who could have done so in ancient or medieval times. The delusions of the ancients and the medievals are not couched in terms of aliens and spacecraft because these are our century's creations. We can laugh at the idea of gods taking on the form of swans to seduce beautiful women, or of devils impregnating nuns, because they do not fit with our cultural prejudices and delusions. The ancients and medievals probably would have laughed at anyone who would have claimed to have been picked up by aliens from another planet for sex or reproductive surgery. The only reason anyone takes the abductees seriously today is that their delusions do not blatantly conflict with our cultural beliefs that intergalactic space travel is a real possibility and that it is highly probable that we are not the only inhabited planet in the universe. In other times, no one would have been able to take these claims seriously. Of course, we should not rule out wishful thinking as being at work here. Although, it is a bit easier to understand why someone would wish to have a mystical experience than it is to grasp why anyone would want to be abducted by an alien. But the ease with which we accept that a person might want to have a mystical experience is related to our cultural prejudice in favor of belief in God and the desirability of union with God. The desire to transcend this life, to move to a higher plane, to leave this body, to be selected by a higher being for some special task....each of these can be seen in the desire to be abducted by aliens as easily as in the desire to be one with God or to have an out-of-body experience (OBE). It is possible, too, that abductees may be describing similar hallucinations due to similar brain states, as Michael Persinger argues. Likewise, the ecstatic and contemplative accounts of mystics may be similar due to similar brain states associated with bodily detachment and a sense of transcendence. Using electrodes to stimulate specific parts of the brain, Persinger has duplicated the feelings of the sensed presence and other experiences associated with near-death-experiences (NDEs), OBEs, mystical experience and the alien abduction experience. The language and symbols of birth, sex, and death may be nothing but analogues for brain states. Shared recollections of experiences do not prove that the experiences were not delusions. The experience which abductees think of as an alien abduction experience may be due to certain brain states. These states may be associated with sleep paralysis or other forms of sleep disturbances, including mild brain seizures. Sleep paralysis occurs in the hypnagogic state or the hypnopompic state. The description abductees give of their experience--being unable to move or speak, feeling some sort of presence, feeling fear and an inability to cry out--is a list of the symptoms of sleep paralysis. Sleep paralysis is thought by some to account for not only many alien abduction delusions, but also other delusions involving paranormal or supernatural experiences. There are, of course, certain psychiatric disorders which are characterized by delusions. Many people with these disorders are treated with drugs which affect the production or functioning of neurotransmitters. The treatments are very successful in eliminating the delusions. Persinger has treated at least one person with anti-seizure medication which effectively stopped her from having recurring experiences of the type described by alien abductees and those with sleep paralysis. Countless people with schizophrenia or manic-depression (bi-polar disorder), when properly medicated, cease having delusions about God, Satan, the FBI, the CIA, and aliens. Even though the stories of alien abduction do not seem plausible, if there were physical evidence even the most hardened skeptic would have to take notice. Unfortunately, the only physical evidence that is offered is insubstantial. For example, so-called "ground scars" allegedly made by UFOs have been offered as proof that the aliens have landed. However, when scientists have examined these sites they have found them to be quite ordinary and the "scars" to be little more than fungus and other natural phenomena. Many abductees point to various scars and "scoop marks" on their bodies as proof of abduction and experimentation. These marks are not extraordinary in any way and could be accounted for by quite ordinary injuries and experiences. The most dramatic type of physical evidence would be the "implants" which many abductees claim the aliens have put up their noses or in various other parts of their anatomy. Budd Hopkins claims he has examined such an implant and has MRIs (magnetic resonance imaging) to prove numerous implant claims. When Nova put out an offer to abductees to have scientists analyze and evaluate any alleged implants, they did not get a single person willing to have their so-called implants tested or verified. So, of all the evidence for abduction, the physical evidence seems to be the weakest. www.skepdic.com/aliens.html
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Post by Henka on Sept 1, 2011 16:15:36 GMT 9.5
John Mack Another alien enthusiast was the Harvard psychiatrist Dr. John Mack (1929-2004), who wrote books about patients who claim to have been abducted by aliens. Many of Mack’s patients had been referred to him by Hopkins. Dr. Mack claimed that his psychiatric patients were not mentally ill (then why was he treating them?) and that he could think of no better explanation for their stories than that they were true. However, until someone produces physical evidence that abductions have occurred, it seems more reasonable to believe that Dr. Mack and his patients were deluded or frauds. Of course, the good doctor could hide behind academic freedom and the doctor/patient privacy privilege. He could make all the claims he wanted and refuse to back any of them up on the grounds that to do so would be to violate his patients' rights. He could then publish his stories and dare anyone to take away his academic freedom. He was in the position any cheat would envy: he could lie without fear of being caught. Dr. Mack also appeared on the Nova "Alien Abductions" program. He claimed that his patients were otherwise normal people, which is a debatable point if his patients are anything like Hopkins' patients who appeared on the program. Mack also claimed that his patients have nothing to gain by making up their incredible stories. For some reason it is often thought by intelligent people that only morons are deceived or deluded and that if a person's motives can be trusted then his or her testimony can be trusted, too. While it is true that we are justified in being skeptical of a person's testimony if she has something to gain by the testimony (such as fame or fortune), it is not true that we should trust any testimony given by a person who has nothing to gain by giving the testimony. An incompetent observer, a drunk or drugged observer, a mistaken observer, or a deluded observer should not be trusted, even if he is as pure as the mountain springs once were. The fact that a person is kind and decent and has nothing to gain by lying does not make him or her immune to error in the interpretation of perceptions. One thing Dr. Mack did not note was that his patients gain a lot of attention by being abductees. Furthermore, no mention was made of what he and Hopkins have to gain in fame and book sales by encouraging their clients to come up with more details of their "abductions". Mack received a $200,000 advance for his first book on alien abductions. Mack also benefited by publicizing and soliciting funds for his Center for Psychology and Social Change and his Program for Extraordinary Experience Research. Dr. Mack, by the way, was very impressed by the fact that his patients’ stories were very similar. He also believes in auras and has indicated that he believes that some of his ex-wife’s gynecological problems may have been due to aliens. Harvard kept him on staff in the name of academic freedom. www.skepdic.com/aliens.html
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Post by Henka on Sept 1, 2011 16:16:24 GMT 9.5
"...despite the fact that we humans are great collectors of souvenirs, not one of these persons [claiming to have been aboard a flying saucer] has brought back so much as an extraterrestrial tool or artifact, which could, once and for all, resolve the UFO mystery." --Philip Klass
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Post by Henka on Sept 1, 2011 16:16:52 GMT 9.5
"Choose the nearest star; decide how long you're willing to travel, how fast you will need to go to get there in that time, what you will have to take with you, and how many should be in the crew. Make it a one-way suicide mission if you wish. As a final step, calculate the kinetic energy that must be imparted to the spaceship to get you there in that time (one half the mass times the velocity squared.) I suggest you stay away from the relativistic limit; it complicates the calculation and won't help you anyway. The good news is that you will then sleep secure in the knowledge that UFOs from elsewhere in the galaxy are not subjecting humans to hideous experiments." --Bob Park
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Post by Henka on Sept 1, 2011 16:22:10 GMT 9.5
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Post by Henka on Sept 1, 2011 16:24:39 GMT 9.5
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Post by Henka on Sept 1, 2011 16:29:20 GMT 9.5
The Doctor's Plot by James Gleick www.around.com/abduct.html"The core of Mack's belief is the following cocktail-party syllogism: People think they were abducted. They don't seem crazy. (And we ought to know--we're experts on mental illness.) Therefore people were abducted. It sounds more respectable in psychiatrist talk, naturally: "Efforts to establish a pattern of psychopathology other than disturbances associated with a traumatic event have been unsuccessful. Psychological testing of abductees has not revealed evidence of mental or emotional disturbance that could account for their reported experiences." Ergo . . . No one remembers their abductions right away. These aliens, clumsy as they are about anaesthesia and scars, have a way of making the experience vanish from the conscious minds of all 4 million of their American victims. (Why is abduction such a peculiarly American phenomenon, by the way? Our national borders aren't visible through the portholes of those spaceships. Mack has an answer: abductions are global, but it's only in the United States that we are lucky enough to have large numbers of UFO-obsessed therapists to help people uncover their suppressed experiences.) Abduction psychiatrists like Mack need a method of helping people remember, and that method is hypnosis. You are getting sleepy . . . when you awake you will remember . . . Hypnosis is all about suggestion. It has always been a fringe practice, as useful to carnival magicians and movie-makers as to clinical psychiatrists, and for every genuine buried memory unearthed by a hypnotists, many more false memories have been implanted. At its best, the process is a conspiracy between hypnotist and willing subject. Time magazine has quoted one of Mack's subjects as saying that she was given UFO literature to read in preparation for her sessions and was asked obvious leading questions. Garry Trudeau has shined his own form of common sense on the process in a Doonesbury sequence that has a hypnotized subject saying "Now I see a . . . a blinding light." "It's a vehicle, isn't it? Some sort of space vehicle?" the hypnotist prompts. "I . . . I can't tell. It has Nevada plates."
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Post by stewartedwards on Sept 1, 2011 17:29:56 GMT 9.5
"...despite the fact that we humans are great collectors of souvenirs, not one of these persons [claiming to have been aboard a flying saucer] has brought back so much as an extraterrestrial tool or artifact, which could, once and for all, resolve the UFO mystery." --Philip Klass Ah Philip Klass one of the greast debunkers of all time Sadly however what he wrote here isnt true, according to abductees anyway. However I am sure you can imagine what happens when an abductee says that they have brought physical evidince back with them Henka. I mean Henka what would you do if you worked for Military Intelligence or Homeland Security of whoever? So this leaves us in a position where abductees do on occassions say "Look what I was able to bring back" but after the initial expose of it it becomes somewhat rather difficult to prove. But of course abductees could be liars Henka. Also quoting people who debunk Budd and John is one approach Henka, and a fair one, after all I myself when I spent a decade investigating ugle and amity freemasonry I made the real effort to talk to current, ex, happy, and unhappy members, as well as people in teh consipracy world and in non ugle amity fraternities, for it is onlyby seriosuly considering the points of view of all sides can you get a fair balanced picture. Anything else is merely propoganda and one sides opinion. It is the same which abductions. John Mack for one was, from reading his books (have you read them in detail?) and from listening to him speak and from a private(Ish) one to one that I once had with him, seems to have a good understanding of the pitfalls of hypnosis, as you would expect from someone of his professional standing and sheer experience in this field. After all people dont become expert witnesses incourts of law on a subject with dodgy reputations Henka. Budd, well a bit different, I have only read his book - Witnessed and updates thereto and listened to him speak, but ask yourself this given that he claims that witnesses include serving police officers (I think one was abducted as well but could be wrong on this) and a politician of international fame, as well as the suport of teh Roman Catholic Church, do you not think that the US Government will have investigated this book. Yet Bud is still doing what he does every week in New York offering support to the continual stream of New Yorkers who have been abducted in his get togethers. Re Susan Blackmore and Sleep Paralysis, I have also corresponded with her, and she probably has a good point re many, for after all John Mack screened such illnesses out before abductees ever got to him. Unlike most of us John Mack was a very wealthy man, funding for example a psychiatric hospital in Cambridge (or similar I forget precisely off hand). Hence his ability to do all of the work that he did. The sad bit is that Henka it is entirely possible, and possibly even likley, that someone you know has had such an experience. I can only hope that if they were to come to you you would try to help them and not simply instinctively lock them up and throw away the key. For many it is one of the great unspokens in life. Partially because of the unwillingness of many to even consider the possibility.
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