Can people really influence the physical world with thought alone?

[Recidiva]

True holy people (as we call them) won't ask to get paid, although it is traditional to offer them some tobacco as a gift.

Someone who asks to get paid is doing it wrong.

Yup. And that's where I draw my line. Accepting a gift for doing good deed is just good manners. It's gracious to accept a gift in return for what you saved or what it meant to someone. I do prefer symbolic to monetary.

I'm vaguely concerned about the idea of karma and whether or not someone with a gift is being granted the opportunity to even some sort of score with a gift to tip the scales at certain times. I'm not convinced that's not the case.

But in the end my judgment in that direction is made mostly because someone who is expected to do something for pay will ultimately be put in a position that will put their integrity up against their bank balance. I think if someone is in the habit of having ego and bank balance win out, it gets easier and easier over time to use lies and manipulation when talent fails to keep the cash coming in.

It's possible to get a decent balance, say in the case of my husband. He does have an unnatural knack that will repair or diagnose or fix a machine faster than anyone else I've seen. He can fix things intuitively...even to the point of knowing when an operator's manual is wrong...it's cool. But he doesn't advertise himself that way. People that around him over time just know to bring him broken things and he fixes them. Always for free. Though the women where he works tend to bring him their broken computers and then bake him cookies.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

My problem with telepathy is in finding a mechanism that might explain it. We've been up and down the electromagnetic spectrum and know exactly what the brain emits, and it's not much, certainly not sophisticated or complex enough to contain specific information such as, "the card I'm looking at is the five of diamonds." So by what medium would thoughts be transmitted?

On the other hand, we have a cat who can apparently tell when my wife is more than a mile away and driving home after work, and a dog who knows when my daughter's coming home from school in three days. How on earth do they do that?

 

[cloudy]

On the other hand, we have a cat who can apparently tell when my wife is more than a mile away and driving home after work, and a dog who knows when my daughter's coming home from school in three days. How on earth do they do that?

You haven't ever known that the phone would ring in a sec? Or when it did ring, did you ever know, intuitively, exactly who would it would be?

There are some things that we just can't explain. It's best to accept something like that as a small gift, and go on, at least that's the way I look at it.

 

[NoJo]

I know the question is probably just intended as a naive one about telekinesis and such dubious phenomena, but there IS no short answer to it, because it contains latent within it such a mass of confused and woolly-minded terminology that to do the question justice would, and in fact does, take many smart philosophers an awful lot of words.

 

[Epmd607]

...

On the other hand, we have a cat who can apparently tell when my wife is more than a mile away and driving home after work, and a dog who knows when my daughter's coming home from school in three days. How on earth do they do that?

I love that kind of stuff, animals are brilliant at reading body language. I'd guess that if you know your wife is a mile away, the cat can read your anticipation. That's nice if your body language changes when your wife's on her way, it may mean she still excites you. Then again, maybe it's just a time issue, people follow super regular schedules daily, animals do to. The daughter and dog, I can't really think of anything, but I'm sure you and your wife also get happier in the days leading up to her return. Animals respond well to a happier owner, they also change mood when you're bummed too. Pet Sounds, Brian Wilson was all over it. Good Vibrations and Sloop John B. haha

 

[lance gt]

Yup. And that's where I draw my line. Accepting a gift for doing good deed is just good manners. It's gracious to accept a gift in return for what you saved or what it meant to someone. I do prefer symbolic to monetary.

I'm vaguely concerned about the idea of karma and whether or not someone with a gift is being granted the opportunity to even some sort of score with a gift to tip the scales at certain times. I'm not convinced that's not the case.

But in the end my judgment in that direction is made mostly because someone who is expected to do something for pay will ultimately be put in a position that will put their integrity up against their bank balance. I think if someone is in the habit of having ego and bank balance win out, it gets easier and easier over time to use lies and manipulation when talent fails to keep the cash coming in.

It's possible to get a decent balance, say in the case of my husband. He does have an unnatural knack that will repair or diagnose or fix a machine faster than anyone else I've seen. He can fix things intuitively...even to the point of knowing when an operator's manual is wrong...it's cool. But he doesn't advertise himself that way. People that around him over time just know to bring him broken things and he fixes them. Always for free. Though the women where he works tend to bring him their broken computers and then bake him cookies.

And the reason you still have this gift is because you believe. If it happened the first time and you denied the reality of it, it wouldn't appear again until your mind accepted the reality of it again. This would be true of someone who can move things. If one can, anyone can because it's "real" now and not a myth or fallacy. The point will be to discover how and establish protocols of the method used.

 

[NoJo]

You haven't ever known that the phone would ring in a sec? Or when it did ring, did you ever know, intuitively, exactly who would it would be?

There are some things that we just can't explain. It's best to accept something like that as a small gift, and go on, at least that's the way I look at it.

The physicist Richard Feynman describes how he suddenly had an incredibly strong premonition that his mother had died. Just then the phone rang. His mother hadn't died, it was a completely unrelated call. He took that as a lesson not to read too much into coincidences.

 

[Recidiva]

My problem with telepathy is in finding a mechanism that might explain it. We've been up and down the electromagnetic spectrum and know exactly what the brain emits, and it's not much, certainly not sophisticated or complex enough to contain specific information such as, "the card I'm looking at is the five of diamonds." So by what medium would thoughts be transmitted?

On the other hand, we have a cat who can apparently tell when my wife is more than a mile away and driving home after work, and a dog who knows when my daughter's coming home from school in three days. How on earth do they do that?

I don't pretend to have an explanation for it. We have pets that do the same thing. And I've seen studies done on animals where owners leave at unpredictable times of the day, taking cabs or horses or buses or whatever weird thing in a day at odd times, and the animals always know. Always at the door tail wagging and waiting 20 minutes before they get home.

I think there's plenty of proof that it's possible and even probable in certain cases. I just don't have a single explanation for it.

People think I'm just a good judge of character, but that doesn't explain why if someone walks BEHIND me, I pick up on what they're thinking and even what song they're about to start singing, and we'll start singing it together, on perfect pitch and tempo.

And if you hang around me enough, I'm just in the heads of people around me. I can't help it and I can't even always tell which thoughts are my own.

I say I learned how not to finish people's sentences for them, but I never learned how to not START their sentences for them. I'm going to start singing the song in their head or talk about a movie they were just thinking about, or mention something they were thinking about. I think it's my own thought. I can't tell the difference sometimes.

But I've gotten the "look" and been told "get out of my head" enough times...and that doesn't happen to other people as much, if at all. I pick up phones before they ring. I pass stuff at the table to people who didn't ask for it...verbally. But they know they were just about to. That happened more when I was a kid and I didn't really learn to wait to hear people's real voices say something.

And most folks don't try to lie to me when they're standing close. On the phone they have a better chance, but on the whole it's just not a good idea. It's almost like what's inside someone's head and what comes out of their mouth has two different melodies, and if they're telling the truth, it'll harmonize. If they're lying, I get dissonance. Again, I can't explain it, but just don't hang out around me and lie, I treat it like hearing screeching feedback.

 

[Recidiva]

And the reason you still have this gift is because you believe. If it happened the first time and you denied the reality of it, it wouldn't appear again until your mind accepted the reality of it again. This would be true of someone who can move things. If one can, anyone can because it's "real" now and not a myth or fallacy. The point will be to discover how and establish protocols of the method used.

This is very true. I do know people who had greater gifts as a child, but then freaked out and thought they were crazy and denied that they could do it, and then...they couldn't any more.

For me it happened so often before I was able to develop critical thought about it, that I just protected it and felt sad that other people didn't have it.

But I don't have the gift of telekinesis at all. And I've tried.

 

[NoJo]

Sorry but all this animal empathy nonsense is completely based on pet owners and is not corroborated by hard evidence . I have worked with a (very) well-known psi researcher, who, to his credit, tries to be as impartial and scientific as possible in his Quixotic search for ESP etc in animals. Always, always, he fails, and always he believes.

 

[lance gt]

I don't pretend to have an explanation for it. We have pets that do the same thing. And I've seen studies done on animals where owners leave at unpredictable times of the day, taking cabs or horses or buses or whatever weird thing in a day at odd times, and the animals always know. Always at the door tail wagging and waiting 20 minutes before they get home.

I think there's plenty of proof that it's possible and even probable in certain cases. I just don't have a single explanation for it.

People think I'm just a good judge of character, but that doesn't explain why if someone walks BEHIND me, I pick up on what they're thinking and even what song they're about to start singing, and we'll start singing it together, on perfect pitch and tempo.

And if you hang around me enough, I'm just in the heads of people around me. I can't help it and I can't even always tell which thoughts are my own.

I say I learned how not to finish people's sentences for them, but I never learned how to not START their sentences for them. I'm going to start singing the song in their head or talk about a movie they were just thinking about, or mention something they were thinking about. I think it's my own thought. I can't tell the difference sometimes.

But I've gotten the "look" and been told "get out of my head" enough times...and that doesn't happen to other people as much, if at all. I pick up phones before they ring. I pass stuff at the table to people who didn't ask for it...verbally. But they know they were just about to. That happened more when I was a kid and I didn't really learn to wait to hear people's real voices say something.

And most folks don't try to lie to me when they're standing close. On the phone they have a better chance, but on the whole it's just not a good idea. It's almost like what's inside someone's head and what comes out of their mouth has two different melodies, and if they're telling the truth, it'll harmonize. If they're lying, I get dissonance. Again, I can't explain it, but just don't hang out around me and lie, I treat it like hearing screeching feedback.

When I think of what you said about reading minds, I think of magnetism. The electrical impulses we generate might work on that principle as well. You "attract"the other person's thoughts to your head. Other's you might repel, same polarity repulsion. That might hold tru for moving objects as well. Two magnets with the same polarity facing will move away because of an invisible force. This may provide some theorists with an avenue to approach. What polarity is each person's brain operating with? Am I a positive charge, you're a negative? Are men and women different? Does this explain good relationships between couples? I believe it has some bearing on how we interact with everything.

 

[Recidiva]

When I think of what you said about reading minds, I think of magnetism. The electrical impulses we generate might work on that principle as well. You "attract"the other person's thoughts to your head. Other's you might repel, same polarity repulsion. That might hold tru for moving objects as well. Two magnets with the same polarity facing will move away because of an invisible force. This may provide some theorists with an avenue to approach. What polarity is each person's brain operating with? Am I a positive charge, you're a negative? Are men and women different? Does this explain good relationships between couples? I believe it has some bearing on how we interact with everything.

If I were to think about it, it would be like radio waves and how I can tune in to certain people.

But this affects me in lots of ways. I very rarely respond to a person acccording to what they look like. For me almost everything is "feeling" what they're like.

It's less about magnetic for me, because that's only directional. What I have seems to be more of just a tuning apparatus that reports on the nearest, closest input. I don't create the input. Same as the radio doesn't compose the song, just picks up on it.

 

[Epmd607]

Sorry but all this animal empathy nonsense is completely based on pet owners and is not corroborated by hard evidence . I have worked with a (very) well-known psi researcher, who, to his credit, tries to be as impartial and scientific as possible in his Quixotic search for ESP etc in animals. Always, always, he fails, and always he believes.

I can't even imagine what animal empathy would look like. There is real research on how pets and owners interact. But you're talking about empathy as in an exchange of ideas between people and pets? Pets are bored all day when you're at work, they anticipate your return because you're probably their only stimulus. Pets certainly change their behaviour according to your mood, that's 'empathy', sorta.

 

[cloudy]

I can't even imagine what animal empathy would look like. There is real research on how pets and owners interact. But you're talking about empathy as in an exchange of ideas between people and pets? Pets are bored all day when you're at work, they anticipate your return because your probably their only stimulus.

Animals don't have a sense of time like we do. They live very much in the here and now, however, that doesn't mean that they don't pick up on other signals.

 

[Epmd607]

Animals don't have a sense of time like we do. They live very much in the here and now, however, that doesn't mean that they don't pick up on other signals.

Animals certainly don't have a lot of things like we do, but they do have many similarities. They can't intellectualize our feelings, but they certainly seem to mirror them. Too bad all dogs go to hell because they haven't been baptized by the Catholic Church.

 

[cloudy]

Animals certainly don't have a lot of things like we do, but they do have many similarities. They can't intellectualize our feelings, but they certainly seem to mirror them. Too bad all dogs go to hell because they haven't been baptized by the Catholic Church.

That view depends very much on whether you're Catholic or not, I would suppose.

 

[Epmd607]

That view depends very much on whether you're Catholic or not, I would suppose.

I'm not a Catholic, I don't think Catholics believe it, but I believe it.

 

[cloudy]

I'm not a Catholic, I don't think Catholics believe it, but I believe it.

That's your prerogative. *shrug*

 

[NoJo]

Some animals have heightened senses compared with humans, and that makes their perceptual world very different. Olaf Stapleden's classic Sirius, about a super-intelligent dog, explores the canine world of scents and sounds beautifully.

Dogs really have a superb sense of smell, and no doubt they can perform feats using that faculty that would seem almost magical to us.

Birds of prey, too, really do have incredibly good eyesight, and can spot objects and movements that are invisible to us.

Snakes have heat-sensors, that work in stereo, so they can literally see heat in 3d!

The weirdest one is the platypus that generates an electric field around it, and uses a hall-effect like a metal detector to create a 3d map of its environment as it swims.

For a while it was believed that blind people could detect light via their pineal gland (the "third eye"), but it looks like that's not the case.

 

[JackLuis]

I didn't think I'd get one answer on this question. I was right, but still wonder if it made a difference if it was a black/Tan/White goat?

The attached article was interesting and only partially a movie review.

I want to see the movie, just for the laughs.

I need some laughs as this tooth is killing me!

 

[NoJo]

I didn't think I'd get one answer on this question. I was right, but still wonder if it made a difference if it was a black/Tan/White goat?

The attached article was interesting and only partially a movie review.

I want to see the movie, just for the laughs.

I need some laughs as this tooth is killing me!

I hate toothache. I spent most of the morning with a clumsy dentist drilling my teeth while his dumb assistant engaged in ten-minute bouts of coughing fits

 

[DeeZire]

If you're talking about a person's thought process changing reality, Amicus does that every time he posts here.

I do remember reading about the dogs anticipating the return of their masters at odd hours. It was well documented, although it could be they only published the documentation that supported their claim and ignored the rest.

The other day, NPR ran a story about visualization in the context of limb loss. They would have the subject stand in front of mirror and flex the intact limb - the mirror image going to the brain would trick it into thinking it was the missing limb. After a few days of this procedure, the lingering pain in the missing limb would disappear. In another study, the subject visualizes doing finger exercises. At the end of the study, they measured marked improvement in muscle tone, even though no actual exercises occurred.

 

[Verdad]

I just figured it out, Pure and Verdad are the same character in this story.

You've 'figured it out' about as well as you figure out everything else. You're a frustrated little piece of work who's trying to establish a sense of self-importance by spewing malicious nonsense and irrelevant citations. Save it for whoever you think is buying it and stop trying to rub your mini dick against me.

With apologies to everyone who's having a nice conversation.

 

[Recidiva]

You've 'figured it out' about as well as you figure out everything else. You're a frustrated little piece of work who's trying to establish a sense of self-importance by spewing malicious nonsense and irrelevant citations. Save it for whoever you think is buying it and stop trying to rub your mini dick against me.

With apologies to everyone who's having a nice conversation.

Well, I think the conversation just got nicer.

 

[Verdad]

Well, I think the conversation just got nicer.

I mostly don't respond to provocations, for that very reason. I don't feel obligated to let someone shit on me incessantly, though. Pacifism is nice, but not everyone gets it.