Friday, January 30, 2009

Things I bought myself this month

I just thought it would be different to go through a list of stuff that i purchased this month.

1. A pack of razor blades
2. Some gatorade
3. A couple of bottles of juice
4. 2 litres of chocolate milk
5. Lotto tickets
6. A pair of jogging pants
7. A pair of sneakers
8. A pack of underwear
9. A webcam
10. A pack of gum

Monday, January 26, 2009

The Trouble Of Talking With Materialists

The big problems i have with talking with materialists is that

1] They are certain they are right[ note: not all are like this but many are]
2] Namecalling such as crackpot idea, pseudoscience etc
3] Using double standards when it comes to evidence


These are common tactics for materialists to use. I mentioned to a materialist that he is ignoring over 150 years of psychical research on the survival hypothesis. What does he say in response, he uses a laughing smiling rolling around. Of course cognitive dissonance is a powerful thing and in this case, he surely is using it. If he took the time to let his preassumptions go to a side. Then look at this evidence i talk about among over survivalists, then concluded his honest assessment. Then I would say he is being an open skeptic.

Sunday, January 25, 2009

Lady Gaga Rocks!!!

I love Lady Gaga's music and i am sure i ain't the only one. The two songs that come to mind that are very good is let's dance and poker face. I have also like dance music, i think that is why i like her music a lot. I also have poker face on my mp3 player.

Saturday, January 24, 2009

The Worst Argument I Have Ever Heard

This come from a materialist he says, their is no evidence for an afterlife. This is obviously false, unless you assume all the evidence is deception, fraud. This to me is false why? because if a materialist really researched the topic they would find a lot of evidence for an afterlife. I think psychical researchers were definitely on to something, a breakthrough that was ignored. That breakthrough is their is strong empirical evidence that supports the survival hypothesis. This evidence has been ignored by the scientific community.


I am not one for conspiracy theories which by the way i am not advocating. More than anything is the current paradigm mainstream science sees things. For example this paradigm is materialism with it's assumptions that reality is all physical.

Friday, January 23, 2009

Common Objections To The Survival Hypothesis

1. "Their is no such thing as life after death"

Reply: First, you have to demonstrate that their isn't. If you don't demonstrate that their isn't then it's your opinion".

2. " Life after death can't be tested scientifically"

This is not true, many psychical researchers have investigated cases that are supportive of the survival hypothesis. Also their has been experiments done to test the survival hypothesis. For example the cross corrspondences, the book tests, the newspaper tests, the proxy sittings, etc.]

3. "Mind is so dependent on the brain that mind cannot exist without the brain"

This is not true, it only seems true if you take the production theory that mind is produced by the brain. The alternative to that would be the transmission theory or filter theory. This view is compataible with psi phenomena and survival of consciousness after death.

4. " Psychics and mediums are out to make money of gullible people, they don't communicate with the dead, they are using cold reading, hot reading and warm reading".

True in many cases but not in all cases.

5. "Psi phenomena and life after death are the same thing"

This one is a common misconception among many materialists. Psi phenomena is about the retrival of information, telepathy for example is the view that you can read someone else's mind.


6. " Life after death is a religious idea"

Not true, their are many people who believe in the possibility of survival and they are not religious.

New Forum I Created

Here's a forum i created http://paranormalexperiences.myfastforum.org/. You can discuss any experiences that are paranormal with other members. Also discuss the evidence for life after death with other members.

Feel free to join.

Monday, January 19, 2009

Russian Neuroscientist Near Death Experience

You can watch it on youtube in two parts.

Man Actually Returns From the Dead After 3 Days Part 1 of 2

http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=crRm9lIzRmg&feature=related


Man Actually Returns From the Dead After 3 Days Part 2 of 2

http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=DCn2ckvgLFE&feature=related

In part 2 of the video the late Barry Bernstein a Neuroscientist says that Cryptomnesia maybe the explanation for why he remembered his father. The problem with this is he was certified dead for 3 days in a morgue. You need brain activity as it is assumed to have anything stored that could be recalled. He also offered it maybe an hallucination again you need brain activity to create an hallucination. The most probable explanation which to neuroscientists is hard to consider is he really had a glimpse of the afterlife.

Could Their Be A Quantum Basis For Psi?

Here is a interesting youtube video of an atheist who goes under a youtube screename "aikiboy111111". He talks about a quantum physics being possibly the basis for ESP etc.

http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=kHIFFl...eature=channel


He says if gravitons and salneutrinos were able to actually move through our universe line, and enter these warped dimensions in the bulk. They could exit one point in our spacetime, re-enter another either traveling backwards in time or apparently traveling ftl. So the graviton base signaling system that he proposes which could be a basis for ESP etc. Apparently does have some theoretical basis in terms of M theory. Apparently this new mechanism is being tested from a new scientist's article in 2006 by something called the mini boom experiment, from the femi lab partical accelerator lab and proof of this particular theoretical model for time travel for gravitons and stalneutrinos should be available already.

Update: I have checked his youtube account and their is no follow up yet. It will be interesting to see what this experiment shows.

Friday, January 16, 2009

Rebuttal To An Post Made By Pz Myers

First, before I get to the rebuttal their was a comment on his blog that i need to address.

Posted by: Kel

Interesting side note to all this:

It's interesting that people who believe in some sort of afterlife fear death the most. While those content with effectively ceasing to exist, aren't as scared of it.

My response

Not true i for one feared death a lot when i believe in materialism.


Now to the post

We never personally experience the extinction of our consciousness, of course, except for the limited loss of sleep — and we always wake up from that (at least, until the last time), so we at least have personal evidence that would inductively imply immortality.

Response: True agree.

It's also a set of beliefs that are remarkably pervasive. Our language and culture and habits of thought make the idea of survival after death continually crop up.

Even when we want to believe that our minds end at death, it is a real struggle to think in this way. A study I published in the Journal of Cognition and Culture in 2002 reveals the illusion of immortality operating in full swing in the minds of undergraduate students who were asked a series of questions about the psychological faculties of a dead man.

Richard, I told the students, had been killed instantaneously when his vehicle plunged into a utility pole. After the participants read a narrative about Richard's state of mind just prior to the accident, I queried them as to whether the man, now that he was dead, retained the capacity to experience mental states. "Is Richard still thinking about his wife?" I asked them. "Can he still taste the flavor of the breath mint he ate just before he died? Does he want to be alive?"

You can imagine the looks I got, because apparently not many people pause to consider whether souls have taste buds, become randy or get headaches. Yet most gave answers indicative of "psychological continuity reasoning," in which they envisioned Richard's mind to continue functioning despite his death. This finding came as no surprise given that, on a separate scale, most respondents classified themselves as having a belief in some form of an afterlife.

What was surprising, however, was that many participants who had identified themselves as having "extinctivist" beliefs (they had ticked off the box that read: "What we think of as the 'soul,' or conscious personality of a person, ceases permanently when the body dies") occasionally gave psychological-continuity responses, too. Thirty-two percent of the extinctivists' answers betrayed their hidden reasoning that emotions and desires survive death; another 36 percent of their responses suggested the extinctivists reasoned this way for mental states related to knowledge (such as remembering, believing or knowing). One particularly vehement extinctivist thought the whole line of questioning silly and seemed to regard me as a numbskull for even asking. But just as well--he proceeded to point out that of course Richard knows he is dead, because there's no afterlife and Richard sees that now.

Response: True, a lot of people believe in an afterlife, so what? the evidence is what we are after. Attacking people for believing in an afterlife doesn't make any apparent evidence for it go away.

Bering also does not discuss (in this piece, at least) another important factor: we rapidly learn that death is not a game of peek-a-boo, it has significant differences from ordinary departures. We learn from our experience that death is permanent. As we get older, we experience this more and more often, and we learn fairly rapidly that there is something about the nature of death that makes it more tragic, since we feel grief and loss. We build psychological coping mechanisms there, as well, and once again, fraudulent religion is ready to leap in and take advantage of another normal human reaction: denial. Promoting denial is a short-term tool for deepening a dependency on superstition, but it is again no virtue to foster irrationality by using personal fears and heartbreak.

Response: The same can be said of materialists, especially if the evidence for survival is true, the psychological fear of persisting forever is also terrifying to many materialists and even some non materialists. Why? because of it getting repetitive, boring over time. This would be true, however it appears that many souls get reincarnated which means that not every soul spends eternity in a afterlife realm.

Update: I have posted a comment on PZ Myers post. Yuu can find it here.

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/10/where_will_you_be_after_youre.php

Monday, January 12, 2009

The Implications Of The Empirical Evidence For Survival

Obviously the implications are huge, I have often pondered the implications of it. Of course their are still materialists who say the evidence can be explained away by natural explanations. For those you believe that, I think they should consider doing some research on experts in afterlife research. Then conclude for or against survival. One of the most often problems materialists have is, they say that they have researched the evidence for survival. But the fact is when you start talking to them, you soon find out that they haven't bother to research the evidence.

Could survival after death not be true?. Of course, that is certainly is something worth considering. What we deal with in science anyways is probability not facts. So with that I would conclude the probability is far greater of survival being true, then not true.

Now the common objection to survival with the transmission theory, is it falsifible? Which I don't think is true, one way to falsify it is to show that our brain isn't a receiver of consciousness. How would we show that?. Well one is through further investigation. We shouldn't rule out transmission theory because it is complicated, or write it off as an apriori.

Just because the production theory is simple doesn't mean it is more probabilble then the transmission theory. We must look at all the facts. Some evidence that materialists use to support their case which are open to different interpretations. For example, Benjamin Libet's finding that brain activity precedes a conscious decision, which is routinely presented by sceptics, in their dull way, as 'another nail in the coffin for dualism' (Blackmore, Dying to Live, p. 237), and which of course is open to contrary interpretations, as Libet himself pointed out. Wilder Penfield's experimental findings on the neurological basis of memory is also used by sceptics in an anti-dualist sense which Penfield himself did not endorse.

Friday, January 9, 2009

More evidence for Mental Mediumship

According to podcaster Alex Tsakaris, he has started doing trials on mediums and skeptic cold readers. The results so far appear to show strong statistical evidence for mediums sorta confirming previous research such as the cross correspondences, showing what they are doing anamalous cognition. An recent interview which was done by Alex Tskaris he interviews Michael Tymn afterlife researcher on skeptiko. Trial 3 is apparently underway.


http://www.mediumexperiment.com/trial3/survey.php?sid=52CC57

Guest: Michael Tymn author of the new book, The Articulate Dead, discusses the history of mediumship and the scientific research surrounding the topic.


http://www.skeptiko.com/index.php?id=72

Monday, January 5, 2009

The Transmission Theory

The reasons why the transmission theory can explain the mind/body problem are as follows.

1] Can explain both the third and first experience
2.] Can account for psi, evidence for survival
3.] Is compatible with Physics

Thursday, January 1, 2009

New insights into the links between ESP and geomagnetic activity

Here is an interesting study on extrasensory perception.

By Adrian Ryan, in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, Fall 2008

A database of 343 free-response ESP trials conducted at centers in the U.K. was constructed in order to test the hypothesis that the relatively fast varying components of geomagnetic activity, geomagnetic pulsations, might be driving the reported associations between ESP, geomagnetic activity and local sidereal time. Local geomagnetic field-strength measurements taken at 1-second intervals during 99 trials, and at 5-second intervals during 244 trials, were converted by fast Fourier transform into power within five frequency bands. Two patterns were observed: ESP was found to succeed only during periods of enhanced pulsation activity within the 0.2-0.5 Hz band, but ESP effect was absent during the most disturbed periods of activity in the 0.025-0.1 Hz band.

The pattern of ESP effect by local sidereal time was similar to that found by Spottiswoode (1997b), and this shape was found to be attributable to the pattern of ESP results by pulsation activity in the 0.2-0.5 Hz band.

The observed patterns were demonstrated to have excellent explanatory power in terms of accounting for findings previously reported in the literature.

Read the entire paper here.

http://www.greyheron1.plus.com/

Big Blizzard Hitting Us

It's bad can't get the door open hardly. Environment Canada says we could get up to 50-60 cm of snow before its over. We got like 30 cm last night now another 30 cm today. Then apparently their is more snow for saturday. I just shoveled an hour ago. To try to get the snow away from the door. My mother helped me do that part then i went out and shoveled a path for my cats to go under and use the washroom.


Here's the forecast for my area

http://www.weatheroffice.gc.ca/city/pages/ns-1_metric_e.html#detailsf

News In Wrestling

WWe fires another wwe agent/producer

According to wwe Barry Windham has been let go of his job as agent/producer. Windham was not on tv for like a few weeks. and it was this week at TV that word began to circulate that he was finished with the company.

Wwe champion Natalya injured. Maryse and Natalya were wrestling The Bella Twins in the third match on the show. As Maryse worked one of the twins over in the corner, she suddenly collapsed to the mat. She appeared to have blown out her knee as she was seen clutching it.

TNAWrestlingNews.com is reporting that Nathan Jones will be starting with TNA around the next PPV.

The production model v.s the Receiver/filter/reducing valve theory

It is often said by Materialists that the dramatic alterations of the brain on the mind/consciousness demonstrates that the brain somehow pr...