I was inspired to post this by a recent 2nd hand personal experience, which happened to a friend. Because I am posting this without her permission, I am leaving specific details out (sorry). It suffices to say that my friend has been having very strange experiences since she moved into her house, years ago. Apparently, an entity has been doing specific things, we'll call them, SPIRIT_ACTIONS, to get her attention. Now, though she is very trustworthy, and very sane, while I took her personal accounts seriously, I never treated them as undeniable evidence of spirits, as I try to be skeptical of everything that I hear. After all, trustworthy people get things wrong all the time. It happens to the best of us. At any rate, the thing that made question my understanding of reality was something that happened to her recently, which has to do with the fact that an acquaintance of hers, unsolicited, confessed that she had been talking to spirits in her home. In particular, this acquaintance told her that the spirit had done SPIRIT_ACTIONS, to get her attention. Now, I did ask my friend for the details of this exchange, and assuming that she is sane/trustworthy, I find her account not to be easily explainable. She did not mention SPIRIT_ACTIONS to this person, nor did she mention in the presence of this person that she had been having these issues.
In light of this, I find my degree of belief in actual physical manifestations of spirits has shifted slightly in the positive direction, which is actually creating much more cognitive dissonance than I am comfortable with.
While, like many of you, I am a fan of paranormal accounts, I am, like some of you, deeply doubtful of most if not all accounts. This is not due to ideology. I was raised in a household that took the existence of the paranormal/psychics for granted, and only acquired my current position after years of looking into the evidence, and weighing pro-paranormal explanations against prosaic ones. Unfortunately, I have found that 99% of the time, even the most seemingly convincing/unexplainable paranormal accounts either turn out, upon further examination of the evidence, to have ordinary explanations, or they cannot be reliably corroborated. In short, everything paranormal seems to be smoke and mirrors.
That includes even things considered to be fairly respectable in paranormal circles, like Dean Radin's research. I have found that there is always a catch, and ultimately, even inevitably, when proponents are cornered by poor statistical analysis, selection bias, systematic error, and the like, they retreat into the non-argument of, "Other science fields (psychology, particular) do it, so why can't we?"
Overall, I find the arguments given by paranormal proponents to be woefully, irreconcilably, lacking in any merit, and that distresses me, because I WOULD like to believe.
And yet, in light of this recent experience, I find myself (slightly) questioning if I am missing something. If spirits do exist, and they can manifest in the physical world, why is it that all we we seem to have, are anecdotal/uncorroborated accounts, poorly performed experiments, mistaken identification, and hucksters?
Comments
Post a Comment