Magical thinking and irrational ideas concerning health

[Grimtina]

Then perhaps you shouldn't call that "telepathy," since that experience doesn't match any definition of telepathy that I'm familiar with

In the same way, if you reduce telepathy from "can actively send and receive words and/or images in a controllable and repeatable manner" to "can sometimes uncontrollably share a random impulse for a fraction of a second in such a way that it is statistically indistinguishable from coincidence,"

I'm pretty confident quantum mechanics will evolve far enough to explain telepathy, and it will likely not even be that long. Time units have relatively little relevance where thoughts are concerned. Contact can be a fraction of a second and convey a lot more than words can.

From what I heard of deja-vu, it's the idea that you have been somewhere before, or experienced something before when in fact you are there for the first time. I had that happen once and later found out I actually had been there before and forgotten about it. It's something totally different. No one was dreaming either. It's the instant sharing of a thought concept (or several).

I never said anything about "statistically indistinguishable from coincidence." It is clearly distinguishable. If a really significant event happens you will never forget. And you may want to talk to people about just to find no one gets it, or even believes it.

[SiuiS]

Huh? I've never mentioned homeopathy asides it never working for me.

Unfortunately, still, it's not just what you said but the emotional impact of how you said it. Here;

And both works really well for many of them. I have seen animals and people recover through homeopathy where modern medicine didn't have a hold. Unfortunately, homeopathy does nothing for me, never did.

A defense of homeopathic medicine even though not personally for you, and

Sorry to differ, when the stuff given consistently improves someone's condition, then the stuff given is the cause. And it doesn't matter a bit how it actually works.

again, an implied 'it is good enough, so it works'.

That's not to say I don't understand what you meant, but this isn't about me and you, so much as the thread at large. It started with Anders saying people still believe in homeopathy, and you responded as a counter; that places you counter to his position (homeopathy = fake) regardless of what you said, based on how you said it. That is what people usually respond to.

It's somehwat laughable that I of all people am telling others how they are being misinterpreted, but hey. There it is.

[Grimtina]

Ah.. as I take most things at word value, not correlating with what others said before, I tend to get lost in longer discussions with lots of implications. I tend to assume people understand that my view differs from people I talk about.

But as to that, I would really like to know how in the world one of the pets (not mine) got better when switched to homeopathy. Even their vet called it a miracle. I tried to check statistics for homeopathic treatments of such cases but of course found little data (not counting the writings of practicioners).

The explanation I got from the owner was something along the lines of water retaining the memory of other molecules so it would be the same as the actual medicine. That is in fact the only explanation attempt I ever heard.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

I'm pretty confident quantum mechanics will evolve far enough to explain telepathy, and it will likely not even be that long.

It's not a matter of quantum mechanics "evolving" at all. While there are plenty of unknowns in QM and the "why" of everything is still very much up for debate, we've got the "what" of superposition and decoherence pretty well figured out and neither comic-book telepathy nor your proposed pseudo-telepathy are likely to have anything whatsoever to do with QM.

Even going with the quantum entanglement proposal, and assuming it's something that "just happens" (it's not), that wouldn't work unless both brains are exactly identical down to the atomic level. You can't quantum entangle "a thought," you have to entangle particles, and entangling particles in two different brains wouldn't lead to any sort of thought-sharing unless both brains are sending exactly the same neurotransmitters between exactly the same two sets of neurons at exactly the same time and those neurotransmitters are interpreted in exactly the same way.

Time units have relatively little relevance where thoughts are concerned. Contact can be a fraction of a second and convey a lot more than words can.

1) Time units have all the relevance where thoughts are concerned. Thoughts are entirely based in physical phenomena (if you're a materialist, and even if you're a dualist a large portion of thought is still physical under that hypothesis), and neural impulses have finite, measurable durations shorter than which nothing registers.

2) I'm well aware that a lot can happen in a fraction of a second, but we're not talking in terms of eyeblinks or anything else macro-scale, we're talking 1/500,000,000,000,000,000th of a relatively short eyeblink, here. Your brain is literally incapable of measuring, much less reacting to, an event occurring on that timescale.

From what I heard of deja-vu, it's the idea that you have been somewhere before, or experienced something before when in fact you are there for the first time. I had that happen once and later found out I actually had been there before and forgotten about it. It's something totally different. No one was dreaming either. It's the instant sharing of a thought concept (or several).

Why are you willing to easily accept that déjà vu is a simple and explainable psychological quirk but not that telepathy is the same?

I never said anything about "statistically indistinguishable from coincidence." It is clearly distinguishable. If a really significant event happens you will never forget. And you may want to talk to people about just to find no one gets it, or even believes it.

That's where the aforementioned confirmation bias comes in. If I drive into work and park between two cars whose license plate numbers are "ABC 2425" and "XYZ 6834" and I happen to notice those numbers and I happen to check the day's lottery numbers and find that they're 24, 25, 68, and 34, you bet I'd remember that for a while and think it was significant...but if I checked and the numbers were 24, 64, 76, and 12 (or even just 24, 25, 68, 35) I probably wouldn't think anything of it and forget about it the next day.

Alternately, if I dump a pile of Scrabble tiles onto the table and they happen to spell out "HELLO DICE HOW R U" it would be pretty cool and definitely memorable, but the tiles have equal chances of spelling out any possible combination of messages containing valid combinations of scrabble tiles and the only reason that the above message is memorable and "FSAJR LVSF UHF D S" is not is that I ascribe a certain significance to the former and not the latter.

The explanation I got from the owner was something along the lines of water retaining the memory of other molecules so it would be the same as the actual medicine. That is in fact the only explanation attempt I ever heard.

If that were the case (which it most definitely is not), then when it drank that water it would be drinking as much raw sewage, rust flakes, and bird poop as it would be medicine. Water molecules are water molecules are water molecules, they don't have any sort of memory, highly selective or otherwise.

[TheThan]

Same can happen with antibiotics, too - there are lots of polluted and fake antibiotics on the market, yet that doesn't mean the real ones don't work. People get ewick taking too many meds, often not even from their doctors, together, yet it doesn't mean the single types of medicine are bad.

Dietary supplements are the worse. This stuff is not really controlled by the FDA (Food and Drug administration, here in the states), so unscrupulous companies can literally put anything in those bottles and mark their contents with anything they want. They are lying to their customers. So you buy something, say Ginseng, there is no telling what is actually in that bottle. It could be something poisonous or something you’re allergic to. Fortunately most of the crap they bottle is mostly harmless but also useless.

I think Doctor Oz (what?) has a list of recommended products to buy from that put what they say they put in their bottles.

Then perhaps you shouldn't call that "telepathy," since that experience doesn't match any definition of telepathy that I'm familiar with, whether we're talking fantasy, comics, New Age woo, or whatever else. What it does sound like is déjà vu, or dreaming things that later happen, or other similar experiences. We don't know exactly what causes déjà vu, but we do know that it is linked to various neurological or psychological phenomena (such as a much higher incidence in people with temporal-lobe epilepsy) and have strong evidence that is purely neurological and/or psychological in nature (i.e. probably associated with humanity's overactive pattern-matching skills, confirmation bias, and so forth) rather than being some sort of mystical precognition.

And here I thought it was just a glitch in the matrix.

[Grimtina]

It's late, I should be in bed, and I should have also set up some games tonight, so I'll shorten this a bit.

Why do you assume I consider deja-vu easily explainable? I do not even know enough about it to make such a statement. But now my curiosity is peaked and I'll look it up more closely.

All I said was it never happened to me but once, which kind of doesn't count as I later found out I was there as a small child. If someone would want to talk to me about their experiences, I'd listen to them. I would look into other explanations, but if none can be found... I have experienced enough strange stuff to not usually dismiss anything unfamiliar to me.

You've lost me with the plate numbers and random letters. This in no way correlates to telepathy. Some random occurances on my way to anywhere would probably not even register with me personally.

I am talking of significant events. Something that matters to you and your/your friend's lives. Maybe in a funny way but usually in a serious one. It would probably equal the scrabble letters in your example spelling out "call ambulance, your wife is injured" and it turns out to be true. Something nothing else can explain.


Oh and about the "water retaining memory" stuff I just remembered I didn't get that from the owner. It was an article in the German version of Scientific American, but a few issues later they debunked the very same article.

[Grimtina]

Dietary supplements are the worse. This stuff is not really controlled by the FDA

Really glad to be in Europe then. Much better regulation here.

Although people tend to overdose on vitamins, and by a lot. All that stuff can be bought in supermarkets which I think should not be allowed. I take my vitamins and minerals due to deficiencies and even then I have regular level checks.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

Why do you assume I consider deja-vu easily explainable?
[...]
All I said was it never happened to me but once, which kind of doesn't count as I later found out I was there as a small child.

That's why. You admit that you haven't looked into it much and are still keeping an open mind, yet when you discovered what caused your instance of déjà vu you accepted that the feeling was just due to a quirk of your memory instead of insisting "It could be coincidence, but I haven't ruled out a non-mundane explanation, so it could be some phenomenon heretofore unexplained by science" the way you're doing with your telepathy.

You've lost me with the plate numbers and random letters. This in no way correlates to telepathy. Some random occurances on my way to anywhere would probably not even register with me personally.

I am talking of significant events. Something that matters to you and your/your friend's lives. Maybe in a funny way but usually in a serious one.

And that's the whole point: random occurrences don't register normally, they're only noticeable and memorable if you attach some significance to them.

The bit with the license plates is a good example, actually, since you apparently didn't notice that the numbers I used for the license plates were the same as the ones I used for the lottery numbers: ABC 2425" and "XYZ 6834" vs. 24, 25, 68, 34. That's the way it works most of the time: there are tons of tiny coincidences in everyday life that people don't notice or completely dismiss, sometimes even when they and their supposed significance are pointed out to them. Only when your mind latches on to a particular pattern that's important to you do you notice, and that still doesn't mean it'll look significant to anyone else.

It would probably equal the scrabble letters in your example spelling out "call ambulance, your wife is injured" and it turns out to be true. Something nothing else can explain.

Or it would, if that's something you were claiming that your telepathy was capable of. With just vague sensations that you can only confirm after the fact, though, we're talking about Scrabble letters spelling out "BAD", you discovering that your wife is injured and calling an ambulance, and then pointing back to the Scrabble tiles and saying "See! It told me she was injured!" because you're reading lots of meaning into it that isn't there on its own.

[thorgrim29]

For the sake of argument, let's say you're 100% right about the telepathy thing and that it exists but is not demonstrable... There's no way you can convince us over a message board, and we can't do anything more then list the reasons why it's implausible and propose alternative explanations to what you experienced. That's a pointless debate.

However, you mentioned Reiki at the beginning of the thread, and that you've seen it heal pets and yourself. That is absolutely something that could be replicated in a lab. As far as I can tell, that leaves roughly 3 explanations:

1: Reiki works but every single practitioner is for some reason adverse to fame, fortune and Nobel prizes, and believes that having people's insurance cover this miraculous healing method or it being offered at hospitals is a bad thing for some reason
2: Reiki works but there is a worldwide conspiracy against Reiki and everyone who tried to prove it has been bribed/silence by scientists who want to keep it quiet because.... evil?
3: Reiki is fake and you feel better because someone (who probably believe it themself) listened to you, reassured you and gave you a nice massage

[Grimtina]

That's why. You admit that you haven't looked into it much and are still keeping an open mind, yet when you discovered what caused your instance of déjà vu you accepted that the feeling was just due to a quirk of your memory instead of insisting "It could be coincidence, but I haven't ruled out a non-mundane explanation, so it could be some phenomenon heretofore unexplained by science" the way you're doing with your telepathy.

No. If I would come to a place I knew I could have never been before - say Japan -and recognize a building, and would know what I would find inside without having to go in first, I would definitely not go and look for a far fetched explanation to pretend it wasn't something unexplained.

And that's the whole point: random occurrences don't register normally, they're only noticeable and memorable if you attach some significance to them.

The bit with the license plates is a good example, actually, since you apparently didn't notice that the numbers I used for the license plates were the same as the ones I used for the lottery numbers: ABC 2425" and "XYZ 6834" vs. 24, 25, 68, 34. That's the way it works most of the time: there are tons of tiny coincidences in everyday life that people don't notice or completely dismiss, sometimes even when they and their supposed significance are pointed out to them. Only when your mind latches on to a particular pattern that's important to you do you notice, and that still doesn't mean it'll look significant to anyone else.

I see. I don't notice patterns I think unless they are geometrical.

Or it would, if that's something you were claiming that your telepathy was capable of. With just vague sensations that you can only confirm after the fact, though, we're talking about Scrabble letters spelling out "BAD", you discovering that your wife is injured and calling an ambulance, and then pointing back to the Scrabble tiles and saying "See! It told me she was injured!" because you're reading lots of meaning into it that isn't there on its own.

No, the word BAD would not be anything CLOSE to it. I used the spelled out sentence for a reason.

[Grimtina]

For the sake of argument, let's say you're 100% right about the telepathy thing and that it exists but is not demonstrable... There's no way you can convince us over a message board, and we can't do anything more then list the reasons why it's implausible and propose alternative explanations to what you experienced. That's a pointless debate.

However, you mentioned Reiki at the beginning of the thread, and that you've seen it heal pets and yourself. That is absolutely something that could be replicated in a lab. As far as I can tell, that leaves roughly 3 explanations:

1: Reiki works but every single practitioner is for some reason adverse to fame, fortune and Nobel prizes, and believes that having people's insurance cover this miraculous healing method or it being offered at hospitals is a bad thing for some reason
2: Reiki works but there is a worldwide conspiracy against Reiki and everyone who tried to prove it has been bribed/silence by scientists who want to keep it quiet because.... evil?
3: Reiki is fake and you feel better because someone (who probably believe it themself) listened to you, reassured you and gave you a nice massage

I was told that, to be able to help people, a reiki person is supposed to be modest and not ask for much in return. Not sure how relevant that is. German private insurance covers it btw and so do some other insurances, even mine - although they do book it under wellness. Other insurances may not even cover normal base meds and force you to use generica even if it is poven you react badly to replica brands. Reiki is in many hospitals here, as are some other frorms of assistence healing. It is even in trauma centers. What's the point?

I am not into conspiracies and I don't get where that comes from. I am not even sure anyone would want to prove anything here. Fakes wouldn't want to be observed and the others probably don't care.

I never got a massage. I didn't talk (hate talking to strangers). I'm sure all healing methods need a psychological component to work well, even surgery. Personally, I think Reiki is more like some sort of resonance between someone who wants you to be better and you just accepting that there is someone who cares. I've never looked much into it because I got the offer and I took it, but that was all. I had ro give a feedback report though. To the insurance that is.

[SarahV]

For reference, I'm an actual practicing shaman, and even I say that the usual defense of homeopathy (an unfortunate term which includes both folk remedies and also anything anyone made up and said science didn't want you to know) is asinine.

Pet peeve alert... The word "homeopathy" refers to a very specific type of treatment (which does not work because it's idiotic ) and not folk remedies or anything anyone made up. People often seem to think homeopathy means "home remedies" because it has the word "home" in it... but that's not true. The concept behind true homeopathy is that "like cures like" - specifically, a substance that causes a symptom will be used to... cure that same symptom. So if you are feverish and shaking, they will give you a substance known to cause fever and shakes. Again I say:

Since this is, of course, completely irresponsible and dangerous, the idea is that you dilute the poison you are giving the sick person until it can't hurt them any more, and, according to the tenets of homeopathy, the more it's diluted, the better it will cure them. End result: you are giving them poison that has been so diluted that it probably does not contain any of the original "medicine" (aka poison). In other words, homeopathic "medicine" is expensive bottled water that might have a molecule of poison in it if you are particularly (un)lucky. It's a complete scam.

At any rate, homeopathy has absolutely nothing to do with folk remedies or other herbal remedies or other random stuff which may or may not work. I always feel like I should point it out in discussions like these because homeopathy should be treated as complete quackery, and folk/home/etc. remedies are sometimes useful and they should not be lumped in together.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

No. If I would come to a place I knew I could have never been before - say Japan -and recognize a building, and would know what I would find inside without having to go in first, I would definitely not go and look for a far fetched explanation to pretend it wasn't something unexplained.

That's great...however, that's not what happened. You experienced a sense of déjà vu that had a perfectly logical and non-mystical explanation, you found said perfectly logical and non-mystical explanation, you accepted said perfectly logical and non-mystical explanation, end of anecdote. Mundane coincidence can be explained through mundane causes in both the déjà vu and "telepathy" cases. A less mundane circumstance demands a less mundane explanation, but in neither case have these scenarios provided you with such.

No, the word BAD would not be anything CLOSE to it. I used the spelled out sentence for a reason.

And I used the short, simple, single word for a reason as well. Again, your "telepathy" as you yourself have explained it to us consists of short, vague, random, and uncontrollable stimuli that you can only confirm to match someone else's short, vague, random, and uncontrollable stimulus after the fact by comparing notes with them. They have no predictability or context and no predictive power. Really, if any one of those attributes was different to a significant extent (very long, very clear, predictable, or controllable) then you'd have something meaningful to work with, but it is absolutely trivial to pattern-match a momentary mental flash with no inherent meaning to tons of circumstances or emotions by applying your own interpretations to it; Rorschach tests are one physical manifestation of this pattern-matching tendency.

The other issue here is the "what has been seen cannot be unseen" problem combined with the "I totally knew that" problem. If someone tells you a cloud has a certain shape, or that a certain recording has hidden words in it, or stuff like that, you're more inclined to recognize what they're pointing out and it becomes obvious in hindsight even if it wasn't at all before. So if someone else has a random flash of something but doesn't ascribe any meaning to it and you come up and say you felt something and ascribe meaning to it, that might not only influence what they think about it but it might cause them to remember only ever ascribing that meaning to it, thus confirming for the both of you that you definitely thought the same thing.


There's a related concept called the Birthday Paradox. In short, if you pick a certain date X and try to find a pair of people who both have a birthday on date X it's fairly difficult to find a match until you have a fairly large group of people, but if you just look for any two people who share a birthday you can find a matching pair with much fewer people than you'd expect. Similarly, if you ask 20 of your closest friends "Who else heard a booming mental voice say Klaatu barada nikto yesterday?" you'll probably never find someone, but if you ask them all to share the funny feelings they had in the past day and try to figure out what they meant, finding two that sorta kinda match is easier than you'd think.

[Serpentine]

The explanation I got from the owner was something along the lines of water retaining the memory of other molecules so it would be the same as the actual medicine. That is in fact the only explanation attempt I ever heard.

This is the common explanation, and it's also complete nonsense. As already mentioned, that means that the water also "retains the memory" of the poop of a million different species, so much pollution, and just, like, all the fish sex. Mmmm, medicinal.

Some relevant videos I encourage everyone to watch: especially The Burden of Proof, but also Open-Mindedness, Critical Thinking and It Could Just Be Coincidence. Srsly, watch 'em.

An individual can believe whatever they want. But if they want other people to believe something (and most especially if they want policies or laws to change according to that belief), you need to offer much, much more than "Well this one time when no one else was around to independently verify it it totally happened to me". And Grimtina, even if we assume you're not just outright lying, we have absolutely no reason to think that your memory of the events is accurate nor objective, nor that your explanations for whatever events did happen are the correct ones. It's as simple as that. That is exactly what the scientific method is for.
To be trite, the plural of anecdote is not data.

[Grimtina]

People often seem to think homeopathy means "home remedies" because it has the word "home" in it...

Oh, it never occured to me English speaking people might think that. It explains a lot.

[Grimtina]

That's great...however, that's not what happened. You experienced a sense of déjà vu that had a perfectly logical and non-mystical explanation, you found said perfectly logical and non-mystical explanation, you accepted said perfectly logical and non-mystical explanation, end of anecdote. Mundane coincidence can be explained through mundane causes in both the déjà vu and "telepathy" cases. A less mundane circumstance demands a less mundane explanation, but in neither case have these scenarios provided you with such.

As you should have gathere dby now (but i have the feeling you deliberately misunderstand me) Yes, it has provided me with such. That's why I keep telling you that there si no other possible explatnation, duh!

And I used the short, simple, single word for a reason as well. Again, your "telepathy" as you yourself have explained it to us consists of short, vague, random, and uncontrollable stimuli that you can only confirm to match someone else's short, vague, random, and uncontrollable stimulus after the fact by comparing notes with them. They have no predictability or context and no predictive power. Really, if any one of those attributes was different to a significant extent (very long, very clear, predictable, or controllable) then you'd have something meaningful to work with, but it is absolutely trivial to pattern-match a momentary mental flash with no inherent meaning to tons of circumstances or emotions by applying your own interpretations to it; Rorschach tests are one physical manifestation of this pattern-matching tendency.

No. You are twisting my words around - which is a common tactic really.

I never said anything about vague. It is anything but. I never said it has to be short, just that it usually is. And yeah, there can be a lot of context. And it can be very meaningful. Just as you can have 1000s of headlines in the news everyday but most things just don't really matter.[/QUOTE]

The other issue here is the "what has been seen cannot be unseen" problem combined with the "I totally knew that" problem. If someone tells you a cloud has a certain shape, or that a certain recording has hidden words in it, or stuff like that, you're more inclined to recognize what they're pointing out and it becomes obvious in hindsight even if it wasn't at all before.

That's never worked for me. I even have issues understanding/seeing something that is in a picture etc, trying to see something others say is there confuses me a lot. Sometimes it may work, usually it doesn't. I actually felt very much left out in the cloud games other kids played all the time.

So if someone else has a random flash of something but doesn't ascribe any meaning to it and you come up and say you felt something and ascribe meaning to it, that might not only influence what they think about it but it might cause them to remember only ever ascribing that meaning to it, thus confirming for the both of you that you definitely thought the same thing.

That implies that this is what has been going on, but that's not it. People making random connections like that annoys me to no end, as I have been pointing out before with my telephone example. I was always referring to obvious, otherwise unexplainable things, which you keep constantly ignoring.

There's a related concept called the Birthday Paradox. In short, if you pick a certain date X and try to find a pair of people who both have a birthday on date X it's fairly difficult to find a match until you have a fairly large group of people, but if you just look for any two people who share a birthday you can find a matching pair with much fewer people than you'd expect. Similarly, if you ask 20 of your closest friends "Who else heard a booming mental voice say Klaatu barada nikto yesterday?" you'll probably never find someone, but if you ask them all to share the funny feelings they had in the past day and try to figure out what they meant, finding two that sorta kinda match is easier than you'd think.

Yes, that's obvious statistics. It doesn't refer to my experiences though. Again, with the scrabble letters example, it would be like a relevant, clear sentence forms, and what it says is actually true. And then this doesn't happen only once or twice. And yes, I know you would need to throw the letters on the table in the first place, which you can't do with thoughts, so the example is a bit bad anyway.

[Grimtina]

An individual can believe whatever they want. But if they want other people to believe something (and most especially if they want policies or laws to change according to that belief), you need to offer much, much more than "Well this one time when no one else was around to independently verify it it totally happened to me". And Grimtina, even if we assume you're not just outright lying, we have absolutely no reason to think that your memory of the events is accurate nor objective, nor that your explanations for whatever events did happen are the correct ones. It's as simple as that.

I have never said no one was around to verify it. That doesn't help though. You can have several witnesses (as in people who were with either party at the time, or you can verify something you couldn't have been informed about has happened) and still people come up with the weirdest ideas of why it can't be true.

One thing that's nothing to do with telepathy but has also never been explained to me (as this is an example that's not about personal stuff). When I was in 7th grade we were on a class tour, one of those scavenger hunts through Nürnberg. At a church, there was a group of foreigners who didn't speak German. I was there with a friend, 2 girls from another class and an assistant teacher. I do remember talking to the foreigners, translating opening times of the church and directing them to a restaurant serving Bavarian specialties. All normal - except that when I turn around the others stare at me and ask me what language that was. Supposedly, it wasn't English, the only language other than my own I was fluent in. I thought they were pulling my leg or something, but they kept insisting. My denial to be able to speak another language (and I still don't know which it supposedly was other than "not French either") even led to an inquiry to my parents, who shrugged it off as "she used to invent languages as a small kid." Except that I have been talking to someone. The 2 girls from the other class ended up being terrified of me, and I lost that friend because she didn't want to be seen with someone so strange. Teacher's assistant kept bugging me for weeks about what language it was and why I was lying about it. School blamed it on my somehow, when it was the others who made those claims, and I ended up confused and scared. It's been one of the major events in my childhood, and no one was ever able to explain it to me. I did claim they were lying, but I was almost suspended for that. I was sent to a child psychologist, who wasn't quite sure what to do with me or why I was there (but on the bright side, he found out I was on the autism spectrum) and also never mentioned the specific incident I was there for.

For a while when I got older I thought I misremembered something. Except that the lasst class reunion I went to I was asked if I remembered the day when I made up a language and talked to strangers in it. If I was still a creep like that? I never went to a class reunion again.

So, what proof do I have for this? None today, but back then? 4 people making this claim, and they were actually believed. I wasn't believed about not knowing some other language. While I haven't thought about this in years, it still bothers me. I want an explanation. I am rather sure I will never get one. Yes, I googled it before writing this, but all I found were some vague references to Xenoglossy. There seems to be no explanation, and most of the cases seem to be obviously made up.

For me, this isn't an anecdote. It's part of my past, and something I'd like to have cleared up.

[SiuiS]

Ah.. as I take most things at word value, not correlating with what others said before, I tend to get lost in longer discussions with lots of implications. I tend to assume people understand that my view differs from people I talk about.

Like I said then, may be best to just resign from the thread. They only get worse, the longer these things get.

But as to that, I would really like to know how in the world one of the pets (not mine) got better when switched to homeopathy. Even their vet called it a miracle. I tried to check statistics for homeopathic treatments of such cases but of course found little data (not counting the writings of practicioners).

You can't say for certain without having 100% knowledge of the animal's biological state for the entirety of it's illness, though. Any made-up answer is as good as another.

My kitty, Teacup, went into severe renal failure. We don't know why; we never got a clear enough picture of it. We were busy managing the renal failure and couldn't afford any exploratory procedures. So we managed her health mechanically, with daily intravenous fluids and running bloodwork to see what her toxin levels were.

She maintained. We kept at it. Eventually she stabilized, partially. We have her food designed for cats which can't handle too much protein (something about the kidneys and it being a burden) and we were able to get her down to fluids every other day. Then just Monday, Wednesday and Friday. She slowly recovered. It took two months. Finally, she was stable enough, healthy enough, to be out on medicine without Risl to her system. This level of "health" still wasn't, though. Her breath would begin to reek at the end of the fluid-cycle as it picked up toxins building. Up in her blood. Her behavior became mopey, sickly. Her neck was flaccid paralyzed and her inability to raise her head was why we took her to the vet in the first place. She couldn't eat, what food she did eat was killif her and we had to stress her system by holding her down and using a syringe to get wet food and vitamin powder medicine stuffs into her body. But she recovered, and it only cost us about a half-year of salary.

And now she's fine. Better than fine! And she seems to have picked up on the fact that we fought so hard for her because she was a prat before and is the most snuggliest critter now. It's a miracle recovery of a cat who had triple the lethal levels of blood toxins and who should be dialysis for life beig for as a fiddle now and we just don't know why because we don't know what tanked her in the first place.

And that's perfectly admissible within modern medicine. Exceptions exist. It's possible that whatever acute damage she suffered prevented recovery, that manually maintaining her health by injecting fluid and forcing food into her have her time to heal when nature would have taken her without that help. We don't know. But this set of justifications is founded in a series of logical, believable buildig blocks which I can verify in other situations.

Mystical healing waters are not things I can justify the building blocks of. So while I can say maybe the animal in your example was just healed using medicine and metabolism and it looked like magic water, I cannot say my cat was actually healed by magic water and it only looked like medicine and tenacity.

Pet peeve alert... The word "homeopathy" refers to a very specific type of treatment (which does not work because it's idiotic ) and not folk remedies or anything anyone made up.

The word homeopathy as used previously in this conversation means whatever the people who used it previously means, however, and my referencing the prior conversation requires me to use the word as others have.

Doesn't matter what the word means, if matters what people were trying to convey when they used that word. For example, I can practically taste the disdain in Anders' original use of the word chiropractic. I don't believe he uses the word to mean chiropractic. I believe he means legitimized-but-still-bunk snake oil.

People often seem to think homeopathy means "home remedies" because it has the word "home" in it... but that's not true.

That's a strange thing to attribute to me. I mean, I did say the thing where I have a legitimate and 'professional' interest in the concepts right?

[Serpentine]

For me, this isn't an anecdote. It's part of my past, and something I'd like to have cleared up.

For you, maybe. For us, it's a neat story with no evidence to back it up. As one of the videos I linked to says, we only have a small part of your perspective of what happened. There's all sorts of information that, through no fault of your own, we have no access to. Therefore saying "you have to acknowledge my explanation for it" is pretty much nonsense. It might be a good start for an interesting study, possibly in the impressive capacity for young people to passively learn complex languages, but in itself it is nothing more than a neat anecdote, just

[SarahV]

The word homeopathy as used previously in this conversation means whatever the people who used it previously means, however, and my referencing the prior conversation requires me to use the word as others have.

Well, when someone misuses a word, there are two ways to go about it. You can go along with whatever incorrect definition you think they meant and further confuse the issue to spare them from having to learn the definition of a word, or you can explain the definition of the word involved and maybe the next time they have this conversation they will be able to make themselves more clear. You chose the former method; I chose the latter.

That's a strange thing to attribute to me. I mean, I did say the thing where I have a legitimate and 'professional' interest in the concepts right?

It was a sentence I used in a post that replied to you - but I clearly did not attribute it to you. Just "people" in general. I've run across this particular misunderstanding/miscommunication many times.

[Asta Kask]

I have never said no one was around to verify it. That doesn't help though. You can have several witnesses (as in people who were with either party at the time, or you can verify something you couldn't have been informed about has happened) and still people come up with the weirdest ideas of why it can't be true.

One thing that's nothing to do with telepathy but has also never been explained to me (as this is an example that's not about personal stuff). When I was in 7th grade we were on a class tour, one of those scavenger hunts through Nürnberg. At a church, there was a group of foreigners who didn't speak German. I was there with a friend, 2 girls from another class and an assistant teacher. I do remember talking to the foreigners, translating opening times of the church and directing them to a restaurant serving Bavarian specialties. All normal - except that when I turn around the others stare at me and ask me what language that was. Supposedly, it wasn't English, the only language other than my own I was fluent in. I thought they were pulling my leg or something, but they kept insisting. My denial to be able to speak another language (and I still don't know which it supposedly was other than "not French either") even led to an inquiry to my parents, who shrugged it off as "she used to invent languages as a small kid." Except that I have been talking to someone. The 2 girls from the other class ended up being terrified of me, and I lost that friend because she didn't want to be seen with someone so strange. Teacher's assistant kept bugging me for weeks about what language it was and why I was lying about it. School blamed it on my somehow, when it was the others who made those claims, and I ended up confused and scared. It's been one of the major events in my childhood, and no one was ever able to explain it to me. I did claim they were lying, but I was almost suspended for that. I was sent to a child psychologist, who wasn't quite sure what to do with me or why I was there (but on the bright side, he found out I was on the autism spectrum) and also never mentioned the specific incident I was there for.

For a while when I got older I thought I misremembered something. Except that the lasst class reunion I went to I was asked if I remembered the day when I made up a language and talked to strangers in it. If I was still a creep like that? I never went to a class reunion again.

So, what proof do I have for this? None today, but back then? 4 people making this claim, and they were actually believed. I wasn't believed about not knowing some other language. While I haven't thought about this in years, it still bothers me. I want an explanation. I am rather sure I will never get one. Yes, I googled it before writing this, but all I found were some vague references to Xenoglossy. There seems to be no explanation, and most of the cases seem to be obviously made up.

For me, this isn't an anecdote. It's part of my past, and something I'd like to have cleared up.

It's impossible to be certain with this little information, but a Transient Ischemic Attack fits the bill perfectly.

[Grimtina]

Nothing there says it would make me know another language. Also I had no symptoms and I was just 14.

[Asta Kask]

Nothing there says it would make me know another language. Also I had no symptoms and I was just 14.

How many people heard you speaking in a language they understand (but you allegedly didn't), as opposed to something they didn't understand. Aphasia would have you speaking gibberish, but to an outsider it might seem like an unknown language. If you were a gorilla, you would be tearing people apart at the Rue Morgue.

[Grimtina]

You kind of confuse me.
The people I gave directions understood me. 4 or 5 people if I remember right. So it can't have been gibberish. I was pretty sure at that time I had been using English, as that is the only other language I'm fluent in. Unless those strangers just pretended to understand and kind of still gave me the right replies. Why would anyone do that?

I want to be a gorilla!

[Asta Kask]

In that case, I can't explain it. Sometimes the best explanation that can be found is "we don't know."

[Grimtina]

Because they answered.

[Asta Kask]

I'm pretty confident quantum mechanics will evolve far enough to explain telepathy, and it will likely not even be that long. Time units have relatively little relevance where thoughts are concerned. Contact can be a fraction of a second and convey a lot more than words can.

These are really extraordinary knowledge claims.

1. How much do you know about QM? For instance, how well do you understand the mathematical framework of the Standard Model?
2. How much do you know about telepathy? Zener cards are no longer considered valid. The dream telepathy studies have not been replicated. The Ganzfeld experiments are discredited. And experimenters have refused to release key data. Magicians are able to replicate the results without psi. Project Alpha revealed how easy it is for people to fool scientists, and the whole psi field is now more preoccupied with rationalizing their failures than doing science. Where are the results? The best you have is Rupert Sheldrake, and last I heard Richard Wiseman was claiming that was bunk too.
3. How do you know that time units are largely irrelevant when it comes to thought? We've known for over 150 years that neural signals travel at a finite speed. Faster than a bird, but slower than sound.

[Closet_Skeleton]

If using homoeopathy means someone doesn't get proper treatment when they need it, homoeopathy is harming that person.

The quack claiming to administer the medicine is harming people.

Homeopathy is just one of many possible bits of blabble the quack could be using. In itself its not harming anyone, its just a set of ideas that could easily be removed and replaced and the same damage would be done.

If someone dies of cancer because they avoided chemotherapy and relied on a crystal healer, you can't blame their death on the quartz.

When someone is proven to have died due to malpractice, we don't send the techniques used to jail.

I'm not and never planned to defend homeopathy. I'm just saying it you have to put the blame where it belongs.

Our modern idea of autism comes from Asperger's work in the late 30s, actually, but you're right that our understanding of it has accelerated tremendously in recent decades.

Not really, Asperger's work was rediscovered very recently and the name 'Asperger's Syndrome' is very modern.

You can prove things beyond reasonable doubt. It's why evolution, and for that matter gravity (which is a laughable comparison, as it implies that we know anywhere near as much about gravity as we do about evolution) are called "Theories" even though FAIAP we know they're true.

Gravity is not a theory, its a law. General Relativity, which describes gravity as a curvature of space time, is a theory.

The precepts of acupuncture go against all relevant knowledge of physics and biology. Prior plausibility - zero.

90% of the body is water. A significant portion of that water is electrically charged, as proteins like collagen have been proven to become superconductors when wet (decades ago they were proven to not be conductors, this proof was done by drying them out, as if expecting it to have its function when removed from where it evolved to work.).

Acupuncture involves poking the body with conductive spikes.

It would be literally shocking if acupuncture did nothing.

Your knowledge of biology is out of date I'm afraid. Pretty much everything you can find in a biology textbook is wrong.

Medicine doesn't care about plausibility. No one knows why lots of drugs work or what processes are behind them. Alternative medicines fail based on evidence and trials, not based on plausibility.

Acupuncture has been proven not to do everything its claimed to do. But that's expected. For centuries people have sold 'cure all medicines' that do actually cure one thing (laxatives are common, they cure constipation but are traditionally advertised as curing pretty much everything). I would guess that acupuncture probably has an area where its very effective, but over the centuries since its invention it has become lost and confused.

And yet we do know rules which are in direct contradiction to telepathy, therefore we can rule that it does not exist.

No we don't.

Quantum mechanics for example, predicts psychokinesis. It just calls it "the observer effect".

Telepathy only requires psychokinesis to effect thoughts, which are probably made of some kind of very low mass moving particles and should therefore be very easy to effect with psychokinesis compared to say, levitation.

Quantum level PK has been studied quite a lot, but I'm sure there are plenty of studies claiming to have debunked these experiments. That or the sceptics just laugh and say "call be again when you have the X-men, then I'll accept it".

Then perhaps you shouldn't call that "telepathy," since that experience doesn't match any definition of telepathy that I'm familiar with, whether we're talking fantasy, comics, New Age woo, or whatever else.

Then you read too many comics and bits of woo.

Parapsychology defines telepathy very differently.

My mother in law believes in homeopathic fruit. By which I mean she takes fruit and dilutes it in sugar, butter, and chocolate until there's no discernible fruitness in the diabetic concoction and then insists that because there's fruit in it, it must be healthy.

A wife of a friend has the opposite belief. She believes she has to drink 8 glasses of water a day, but believes that fruit squash does not count as water since it contains a tiny amount of diluted concentrate.

Project Alpha revealed how easy it is for people to fool scientists, and the whole psi field is now more preoccupied with rationalizing their failures than doing science.

Sounds a lot like astronomers and dark energy.

[Serpentine]

The quack claiming to administer the medicine is harming people.

Homeopathy is just one of many possible bits of blabble the quack could be using. In itself its not harming anyone, its just a set of ideas that could easily be removed and replaced and the same damage would be done.

If someone dies of cancer because they avoided chemotherapy and relied on a crystal healer, you can't blame their death on the quartz.

When someone is proven to have died due to malpractice, we don't send the techniques used to jail.

I'm not and never planned to defend homeopathy. I'm just saying it you have to put the blame where it belongs.

Quibbling and semantics. Homoeopathy, in those cases, is harming people. The fact that the quack is using homoeopathy to harm them doesn't change the fact that homoeopathy is harming. If a murderer poisons someone with arsenic, you wouldn't insist that it was really the murderer doing the poisoning, not the arsenic, even if they're the one responsible for it.

[Asta Kask]

90% of the body is water. A significant portion of that water is electrically charged, as proteins like collagen have been proven to become superconductors when wet (decades ago they were proven to not be conductors, this proof was done by drying them out, as if expecting it to have its function when removed from where it evolved to work.).

1. No, it's 45-75% depend on how much body fat you have.
2. Given that the autoprotolysis constant of water is 10^-14 I find that extremely doubtful. I need a citation.
3. Re: collagen being a supernductor: Ok. That I need a citation for. What critical temperature are we talking about?

Acupuncture involves poking the body with conductive spikes.

It would be literally shocking if acupuncture did nothing.

Oh it does thing, it just doesn't heal people. Acupuncturists are great at producing abscesses, heart tamponade and puncturing lungs and other body cavities.

Your knowledge of biology is out of date I'm afraid. Pretty much everything you can find in a biology textbook is wrong.

Medicine doesn't care about plausibility. No one knows why lots of drugs work or what processes are behind them. Alternative medicines fail based on evidence and trials, not based on plausibility.

Acupuncture has been proven not to do everything its claimed to do. But that's expected. For centuries people have sold 'cure all medicines' that do actually cure one thing (laxatives are common, they cure constipation but are traditionally advertised as curing pretty much everything). I would guess that acupuncture probably has an area where its very effective, but over the centuries since its invention it has become lost and confused.

It hasn't been proven to do ANYthing. Not in a good study, not in a double-blinded randomized study which is the gold standard for a good study. If you know of such a study, well... citation needed.

Quantum mechanics for example, predicts psychokinesis. It just calls it "the observer effect".

The observer effect has nothing to do with psychokinesis, or the other New Age Choprawoo you may have heard of. Listen to real scientists, people like Lawrence Krauss, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Brian Greene. You do not know anything about quantum mechanics.

Quantum level PK has been studied quite a lot, but I'm sure there are plenty of studies claiming to have debunked these experiments. That or the sceptics just laugh and say "call be again when you have the X-men, then I'll accept it".

You see, this is where a citation to the original article would be helpful.

A wife of a friend has the opposite belief. She believes she has to drink 8 glasses of water a day, but believes that fruit squash does not count as water since it contains a tiny amount of diluted concentrate.

I don't give a flying **** what she believes. Can she prove it?

Sounds a lot like astronomers and dark energy.

No. Not if you know what you are talking about.