pulling the plug on tangential reasoning
CLAIM:[b]If someone claims Shared dreaming is real, it is because they have experienced it, or they have faith in it.
if someone claims shared dreaming is not real, it is because they not experienced it and are prejudiced.
yea ? Nay?[/b]
specifically what I underlined, lets talk about this, and apply it to “God”, “breathing”, “sex”, “gravity”, or etc. Is this “True”
what “if” “I” put “quotations” around everything?
or start speaking Ewok… what would be going on here? WARNING, TANGENTS!
When I state that psychic experiences such as mind reading, using another’s body (with their consent), shared dreaming, etc, are real, it is because I have witnessed them, not because I want to witness them.
[color=olive]So, something is witnessed, and then, whether the language is agreed or not, we agree that it is witnessed…
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thoughts?[/color]
bringing the eyes back to the bolded text, in one way, spoken, it is like issuing a law, a command, and standing from before a podium, making a statement that reality is true, and it is the way it is said, however, presenting it another way, by prefixing it as a CLAIM a different approach is utilized.
If you come upon an idea like shared dreaming, and it offends your beliefs of course your going to wonder about the people who believe it to be possible. The skeptics may view the believers as someone with “out there” thoughts.
That’s true, and you’re right: just because something is rare, doesn’t mean it isn’t real – it only means it’s rare. But my point is that one would think we would be seeing a similar scientific discovery of shared dreaming if it is indeed real - with lucid dreaming, researchers like Hearne & Worsley, and Dr. LaBerge had amassed thousands of scientifically valid accounts of lucid dreams within the span of only a few years. If shared dreams are real, why aren’t sleep researchers collecting the reports, especially now that we have lucid dreaming techniques to help us make better use of the time we have while dreaming for the experiments? Shared dreams being rare is one thing that is easy to accept, but that they are so rare that the odds of having a shared dream are even worse than simply having similar dreams by coincidence makes it hard to believe there is anything special going on. That is all I meant to say with my example.
Asking for good reasons to believe in something isn’t pseudo-skepticism at all. I’m sure you’d agree with me that if we are going to believe that shared dreams are real, we would want good evidence. it’s just that our opinions differ on what qualifies as good evidence.
I agree completely, and as I’ve said numerous times I would be pretty thrilled if evidence for shared dreaming was there, but I don’t see that it is. All there is are very sparse accounts (which, like with lucid dreaming, should have become much more numerous since the 19th century) which, statistically, add up to the same frequency of occurrence as coincidence. So I simply follow ockham’s razor, and come to the most reasonable conclusion…and everyone please keep in mind, I could be wrong and I am always waiting for new, fresh evidence: this is true skepticism.
haha that made me think of the question of whether or not a tree that falls with no one around to hear it makes a sound.
i think the answer would be no, because it’s only a sound when we hear it and call it a sound. before that it’s just moving air, right?
on the topic of the thread, i’ve heard of people having code words that people tell each other in the dream and then verify the next day without telling them what the word was. apparently some people have had success with that, but that’s taking their word for it.
SD’s would be like The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch haha
where they have a shared hallucination of being Perky Pat or Walt in a perfect world
What do you all think of the idea of not believing in anything? This is an idea I’ve been toying with for a while, and it sounds good in my head - then, when I try to explain it, it sounds a bit silly, I think.
So, reading through this post is strengthening my previously held belief that we cannot know anything for sure (I was excited when mattiasdavis mentioned that). I first started thinking about how little science can really do for us when Bruno mentioned something about science’s shortcomings nearly a year ago in some other topic. Imagining for a moment that everything and everyone I experience is solely a product of my mind - the Matrix idea - brings up so many ramifications. It makes everything that I have ever experienced not only useless, but irrelevant. As a girl in my history class quickly interjected whilst we were having this conversation: “That’s a dangerous way to think!”
But is it a dangerous way to think? The girl went on to talk about the apparently negative effects thinking in such a way would have upon one’s life. She talked about the lack of productivity, mostly. I often think of that too: is being productive really what makes people happy? Or at least what, in the end, will make people feel good? It sometimes annoys me when people vehemently vouch for productivity. When my acquaintances talk about their opinions on people who decide to use drugs, even alcohol - heavily or not - the discussion often leads to that point. Is productivity necessarily a good thing? I really don’t know.
So, where am I going with this? I’m beginning to hesitate believing strongly in anything at all. There are so many possibilities! Although science has seemingly pointed strongly towards some conclusions, I still find it presumptuous to hold on to any of them too strongly - if at all. I mean, if we can’t know for sure, why take a stance? I kind of like it like that.
Must be an urban legend. This is an existing protocole indeed but I’ve never read it had success.
First, if they reject every SD account as “certainly a coincidence, not a SD” like you’re doing, we will not have a lot of possibly shared dreams accounts. I gave you above three curious examples of shared content (you can read one of them here), Rod Serling gave you one and you still continue to react as if there were not known reports. LaBerge himself is more open-minded in this article. Now imagine that the scientific protocole he describes would be set in place. How many time (and money) would it take to set this experiment since SD are far rarer than LD’s? LaBerge experienced difficulties to get the instruments during enough time (one week if I remember well) for his experiments about LD’s. Which sleep laboratory would be willing to put equipment at the disposal for such an experiment during many months?
Pseudo-skeptics have a goddess called Coincidence. She’s very useful cause she explains anything.
How can you say it’s a coincidence? Do you have any statistical mean to prove that it’s “the same frequency of occurrence as coincidence”? I don’t think we have any mean to determine the probability of a certain dream with certain images to occur. In my opinion, a scientific means to investigate the phenomenon would be to create a comparison ratio between two written reports to determine the percentage of chance they describe the same event. Then to take random dreams accounts which are for sure not shared (from different people who don’t know each other and at different times) and compute the probability that two dreams may look like they described the same event. Etc. In my knowledge, such a method to compare events reports doesn’t exist. And as long as this doesn’t exist, judging an alleged SD report by estimating by guesswork its “vagueness”, “lack of details”, etc. is just an personal opinion (which is by the way as biased by the will for not accepting it than, for some others, it’s biased by the will for accepting it).
So that I think the only thing we could say in our state of knowledge is: “I find that alleged SD reports are extremely rare, especially when I take in account the number of dream reports I’ve read. Moreover, I don’t find that the SD reports I’ve read are very conclusive” (for instance, if you think so. As for me, I don’t.)
What I say to you from the beginning is that claiming that it’s just coincidental is nor a scientific neither a rational opinion.
And it’s pseudo-skepticism cause true philosophical skepticism is something like wnvoss explains later.
I’ve tried. I had called it the “Ragnarok Project”. It’s just impossible IMO: you replace positive beliefs (“I believe this thing works like that”) by negative beliefs (“I don’t believe this thing works like that” = “I believe this thing doesn’t work like that”). But it was an interesting experiment anyhow.
First philosophical error in the practice of your system. “Everything and everyone I experience is solely a product of my mind” is a belief. Thus it’s not philosophical skepticism, it must be something like solepcism (plus a sort of idealism). By the way, this is very paradoxical. Is your mind a product of your mind?
I think she’s right. It is likely to lead to a sort of depressive mood due to the loss of meaning and relativism of values. Lack of productivity is just a way of expressing it in a capitalist system of beliefs.
But it’s a little out of topic, don’t you think so?
In the original post he asked for an explanation not proof.
This topic has become a general discussion of science, belief and proof.
I have looked for somewhere to smoothly split it into a separate topic but there is no definitive post when it goes into a general discussion.
It seems to have run it’s course and I will lock it, but feel free to start a new discussion in lounge on the nature of scientific proof, scepticism, belief, philosophy and their relationship to each other.
I’m beginning to hesitate believing strongly in anything at all. There are so many possibilities! Although science has seemingly pointed strongly towards some conclusions, I still find it presumptuous to hold on to any of them too strongly - if at all. I mean, if we can’t know for sure, why take a stance? I kind of like it like that.
It’s just impossible IMO: you replace positive beliefs (“I believe this thing works like that”) by negative beliefs (“I don’t believe this thing works like that” = “I believe this thing doesn’t work like that”). But it was an interesting experiment anyhow. 
