Evolution and paranormal things

Like I mentioned in a post above, there seem to be three choices as to what the case of the kid and the F4 involves, i.e. fraud, actual reincarnation, or the kid having picked up a signal of some sort, somewhat the way that the prophets claimed to have. I like the third choice better than the other two.

You have to include the fourth option which is that the evidence is simply being missunderstood or that there is bias (likely unintentional) in the reporters/observers. Why do you refuse to consider that option?

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

The question of "what organs" is not one for the evolutionists. That is your problem, to address how the phenomenon works in the present. Without that, we don't have enough information to judge whether a sequence of intermediates is plausible or not. In fact, all models to explain the origins of the phenomenon are at something of a loss...

Did you ever get a look at the web page which I mentioned, and which I mentioned on t.o at least once, i.e.http://www.bearfabrique.org/babel.htmlIt would appear that the question of what organs might be involved in paranormal things has at least one answer in at least some of the instances, i.e. the right-brain analog to the Wernecke (speech) area which Jaynes mentioned. Now, whether or not the kind of thing Jaynes speaks of could serve to pick up a signal which had been bouncing around in the universe for 60 years after Iwo Jima is another question. That I do not have an answer for.

I'm not refusing to consider anything. I mentioned the three options which seemed likely to me. I would include the idea of something being misinterpreted or misunderstood in item three which I mentioned and bias in item 1 i.e. fraud.Again fraud strikes me as unlikely when you have a young child coming up with details which you don't even find in history books and actual reincarnation strikes me as unlikely for a number of other reasons.

redwolf The real puzzle here is how does a phenomena that produces a signal powerful enough to last 60 years not make itself known all the time?
In other words how has it escaped detection?

Wish I had an answer for that.

There's no mystery here. The human body - all living bodies - pick up radio signals.That's why your TV reception improves when you touch the antenna. That's why portable TV's have a metallic neck-strap - the contact with your body improves reception.They can suspend frogs in mid-air with sufficiently powerful magnetic fields. Picking up a stray radio signal isn't going to be hard.Interpreting it in a brain would seem to be the major challenge, and I still don't understand why you don't think this kid could have picked up something from TV or a movie. If you've ever seen a kid play Yu-Gi-Oh you should know that they have an incredible capacity for memorizing trivia.

redwolfThe likeliest answer given our current state of knowledge is that the phenomena does not exist.These are the same criteria that need to be met in issues such as ESP. Science itself does not state that such things do not occur but rather there is no good evidence to support such a claim. Also we need to get some kind of handle on a mechanism by which such phenomena can explained.If we postulate,say,that ESP is there but not detectable by science then we need to explain how that is so.We can make measurements on gravity and it is exceedingly weak so why something powerful enough to last all those years does not make itself detectable.

The likeliest answer given our current state of knowledge is that the phenomena does not exist.These are the same criteria that need to be met in issues such as ESP. Science itself does not state that such things do not occur but rather there is no good evidence to support such a claim

That statement might have sounded reasonable 15 years ago. Today in light of Rupert Sheldrakes studies, it simply does not.http://www.sheldrake.org/nkisi/Sheldrake uses good experimental design and absolutely ordinary statistical methodology. The odds of the parrot coming up with good answers by chance in the test described are beyond astronomical.Moreover, the Nkisi story is one of a number of such tests in which statistical methods show paranormal phenomena to exist to a virtual certainty.

Interpreting it in a brain would seem to be the major challenge, and I still don't understand why you don't think this kid could have picked up something from TV or a movie.

It's possible, but I'd rate it hellishly unlikely. The thing about the tires on the F4s is something I'd not heard or read before and I've seen and read a hell of a lot about WW-II including pretty much every sort of Victory at Sea and Crusade in the Pacific episode which talk about carrier warfare as well as a couple of documentaries which talk about the F4 and F6 specifically. I'd almost figure you'd have to have been there to know that.

Again I don't see anything here for which the most likely explanation is an undetected, unknwon mechanism for the transmission of memories through time and space.We don't know the situation where these "memories" were reported, and young children are known for being extraordinarily eager to please. Think back to all those cases of "demon possession" and satanic abuse in the 80's - it all turned out to be people telling therapists what the therapists wanted to hear.It would be all too easy for someone to ask "Hey, kid, were you shot in the engine, like that pilot was?" and for the kid to just say "yes." The next person who asks might get that exact story.Without an airtight methodology, this is an anecdote. I don't see that it's all that scientific to construct paradigm-shaking hypotheses from anecdotes.

redwolfSorry Old Man but Sheldrakes' studies have yet to be repeated by others to establish a better level of credibility and there is still no clear explanation for a mechanism and a study to determine if such a mechanism even exists.The jury is definitely still out on this especially in light of the number of "promising" studies over the years that turned out to be bogus.AS for the parrot here is an excerpt. See if you can spot the problem inherent in the test. Hint: It is within the quotation marks I have inserted.

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"We cannot define anything precisely! If we attempt to, we get into that paralysis of thought that comes to philosophers, who sit opposite each other, one saying to the other, 'You don't know what you are talking about!' The second one says 'What do you mean by know? What do you mean by talking? What do you mean by you?', and so on."

redwolf:Two or three times you have evoked the work of Julian Jaynes in support of some point of parapsychological phenomenon or other. For example, in message 22: There's nothing of the paranormal in Jaynes' work; such claims are your own, and in fact you're at pains to discredit his views on your own site. Jaynes used the fact that stimulation of the right-brain analogue to Wernicke's area produces auditory hallucinations in most people; he did not claim that in what he called the bicameral mind these were anything other than hallucinatory. (And, by the way, he didn't have to "go ask people in neurophysiology" to find him some auditory hallucinations. He quoted the work of Penfield and Perot.) Unless you are making the claim that so-called paranormal activity is specifically auditory in nature there's no grounds for bringing Jaynes up at all.As for little Jimmy Leininger, you say: which rather flies in the face of the thousands of things people do to gain the attention of other people, let alone the media, on a daily basis, not to mention the involvement of a "therapist" who makes her living selling this stuff to people. On the basis of yet another Gee Whiz piece of media puffery, I'll take Fraud/Self Deception for $100.

There's nothing of the paranormal in Jaynes' work; such claims are your own, and in fact you're at pains to discredit his views on your own site. Jaynes used the fact that stimulation of the right-brain analogue to Wernicke's area produces auditory hallucinations in most people; he did not claim that in what he called the bicameral mind these were anything other than hallucinatory.

In a couple of places he either did or came within a micron of doing so.Julian Jaynes wrote of the oracle at Delphi:

The replies to questions were given at once, without any reflection,
and uninterruptedly. The exact manner of her announcements
is still debated, whether she was seated on a tripod,
regarded as Apollo's ritual seat, or simply stood at an entrance
to a cave. But the archaic references to her, from the fifth century
on, all agree with the statement of Heraclitus that she spoke
"from her frenzied mouth and with various contortions of her
body." She was entheos, plena deo. Speaking through his priestess,
but always in the first person, answering king or freeman,
'Apollo' commanded sites for new colonies (as he did for presentday
Istanbul), decreed which nations were fiiends, which rulers
best, which laws to enact, the causes of plagues or famines, the
best trade routes, which of the proliferation of new cults, or
music, or art should be recognized as agreeable to Apollo - all
decided by these girls with their frenzied mouths.

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Truly, this is astonishing! We have known of the Delphic
Oracle so long from school texts that we coat it over with a
shrugging usualness when we should not. How is it conceivable
that simple rural girls could be trained to put themselves into a
psychological state such that they could make decisions at once
that ruled the world?

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The obdurate rationalist simply scoffs plena deo indeed! Just
as the mediums of our own times have always been exposed as
frauds, so these so-called oracles were really performances
manipulated by others in front of an illiterate peasantry for
political or monetary ends.

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[b][i]But such a realpolitik attitude is doctrinaire at best. Possibly there was some chicanery in the oracle's last days, perhaps some bribery of the prophetes, those subsidiary priests or priestesses who interpreted what the oracle meant. But earlier, to sustain so massive a fraud for an entire millennium through the most brilliant intellectual civilization the world had yet known is impossible, just impossible. Nor can it gibe with the complete absence of criticism of the oracle until the Roman period. Nor with the politically wise and often cynical Plato reverently calling Delphi "the interpreter of religion to all mankind."[b][/i]

Here, Jaynes stops just about a micron short of the real $64,000 question:

[b][i]How could anybody sustain so massive an institution for an entire millennium through the most brilliant intellectual civilization the world had yet known, [b][/i]

OTHER THAN WITH REAL INFORMATION?

Christianity has managed to control society for roughly one and half thousand years without having any basis in fact, why should the oracle be any more impressive.And 'most intellectual society in history' - please.