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Unlikely Occurrences

I once dreamed of a man, of whom I shared a slice of pizza with in a public cafeteria, and his face was on the first page of reddit as a missing person. This, by far, is the most unreal dream I have ever had.

That's very interesting...
 
Intention and manifestation are real, but they don't work the way that most new age people are describing it.

If something is real, that means it happens in the real world and can be demonstrably proven. We probably wouldn't be having this discussion if this stuff were so. There is absolutely no evidence for these ideas and there is evidence that the universe is blind and random.

Otoh, I guess I am curious as to your own explanation for this which differs from "New Age" notions.

I find the scientific attempts to explain it away really laughable.

No scientist i knoq of is uncomfortably trying to "explain away" these events or wasting any time on this at all particularly when it is already all more explicable via confirmatuon bias. The point for me is trying to show how absurd the setting up and enactment of these events has to be in a world where the laws of physics are demonstrably immutable.

Material reductionists should stick to what they're good at: analysis of the material world. They have no business trying to explain metaphysics.

How is a physical event in the real world 'metaphysical'? If license plates are being sent forth with prophecy, that is a physical event (that could be used as evidence for a metaphysical event.) You would have to explain the multitude of other physical events that must occur for the main events to synchronise and for the underlying metaphysical meaning to make itself known. This shouldn't be seen as a concept that cannot be reasoned through just because it is subjective.

You know when an intersectional event has happened. You can feel it in your core. It's not rational or linear. It feels like magic and that's because it is.

You should only know an event has happened when you see proceeding effect from it. Anything else is irrational speculation.

It's the same old argument. People who don't experience magic in their core are 'doing it wrong'. That's the vast, overwhelming majority of people though who don't have these experiences (or talk about them at least)

I don't think science or human reason can answer every question, for what it's worth. :\
 
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That's very interesting...

Yeah I forgot to mention his face was on reddit the first thing when I woke up. This is him:

images


Granted he looks a little like a friend I worked with and the dream may have been a watercolored blur as most dreams are. Honest to God though I almost shat myself, I must've been pretty convinced.
 
@swilow: hemmed it indeed! no worries though oh chill one, good follow through.

swilow said:
It's the same old argument. People who don't experience magic in their core are 'doing it wrong'. That's the vast, overwhelming majority of people though who don't have these experiences (or talk about them at least)

99 out of 100 times. that or those who do experience fall back on this as an unreasonable explanation (imho).


swilow said:
I don't think science or human reason can answer every question, for what it's worth.

i would say not yet anyway but i don't think we will ever fully understand everything as a species before the universe caves in so we wont be able to explain it all. optimism, cynicism and an open mind on this one is what i think i'm working with so ya, your right.
 
Intention and manifestation are real, but they don't work the way that most new age people are describing it.

I find the scientific attempts to explain it away really laughable. Material reductionists should stick to what they're good at: analysis of the material world. They have no business trying to explain metaphysics.

You know when an intersectional event has happened. You can feel it in your core. It's not rational or linear. It feels like magic and that's because it is.
Foreigner, I would also be very interested to hear some elaboration about what you mean here. swilow has already responded quite well I think, so I won't bother to do the same point by point, as I generally agree with the points already made.

That said, you have posted in a somewhat cryptic way, and I suspect I do not entirely agree with you, although admittedly I would probably qualify as one of the "material reductionists" you are referring to. :)

Just to be clear that I understand you - you are saying, essentially, that experiences of synchronicity are something metaphysical, and cannot be explained in a rational way? Additionally, that people can innately "know" when they have experienced such an event, despite the lack of any physical means to explain this phenomena?

The first point I think is essentially unprovable and unfalsifiable - as is the nature of anything said to be outside rationality or reason - given that these tools are really the only means we have to assess the likelihood or "truth" of anything, so I won't bother to address this any further. However the second point I think is reflective of a counterproductive and harmful human tendency - to assume that our "gut feeling", instinct, blind faith, or whatever you want to call it, is in at least some circumstances a reliable way to assess events in the world.

When I say this is harmful, we only need to look at history for the evidence - in times when reasoned, logical thought was given less weight, and a less scientific approach was taken to determining guilt in more primitive societies, it might only take a few rumors and being considered something of an outsider or "oddball" to be accused of witchcraft or sorcery and suffer some horrific punishment for an unfalsifiable and ultimately metaphysical crime (whether guilty or not, and I'd venture to say that unjust punishments were doled out far more often than they are today).

But even today humans consistently make errors of judgement that harm themselves and others through over-reliance on gut feelings and "innate knowledge" rather than rational assessment of facts - ultimately, gut feelings are based on emotions - to some extent, although an argument may be made that there are other factors involved - and human emotions are vulnerable to exploitation, manipulation and bias by both conscious and unconscious agents in our world. While obviously experiencing a synchronous event and happily putting it down to magic probably, usually, has far less harmful consequences than, say, a judge making an assessment of guilt based on someone's skin colour because of just "feeling it in their core" that this person is guilty, influenced by unconscious biases that they may or may not be aware of - the mechanism behind these things, I would say, is equivalent... and for that reason I think that saying that people can just know anything, or "feel it in their core", is problematic.

Of course, that is a fairly rational assessment, or at least I would like to think so - based in human logic and physical evidence of what we know about our own history... so if the nature of "feeling something in your core" is said to be beyond reason, then an assessment based on physical evidence rather than "metaphysical evidence" (as far as such a thing even exists) can be fairly conveniently dismissed.
 
^I very much agree with the notion that we should be deeply wary about paying too much credence to notions that arise through instinct or one's "core". The very nature of those sort of experiences occurs before we have time to really reason them out, and I think its wise to be sceptical of anything we "know" without knowing why we know it.

I read a book recently about the idea of supernormal stimulii, in short:

A supernormal stimulus or superstimulus is an exaggerated version of a stimulus to which there is an existing response tendency, or any stimulus that elicits a response more strongly than the stimulus for which it evolved.

Studies where animals will tend to favour an exagerrated teat for example, over a real one, despite the imposter-teat providing no milk. Mothers who prefer roosting on enormous medicine balls in lieu of their rather more productive, but smaller, real egg. In the real world, we need to be able to perform certain tasks without needing to think, and these actions are triggered by sensory clues within the environment. Like a pair of boobs, for example.

Of all animals, our ability to find patterns and elicit meaning from those patterns is extremely prominent; in the words above, you could say we have an innate 'response tendency' towards processing reality in this way. We certainly do not have to perform much conscious processing to see a face in the moon, or a papier-mache birthday cake in the clouds, or deriving the meaning behind symbols on a computer screen. And humans utterly litter the environment with communication and structure/patterns which further exagerrate this pattern seeking response.
 
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