--- In [email protected], ruthsimplicity <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > --- In [email protected], "authfriend" <jstein@> wrote: > To finish up my prior post: > > Judy said: > > Again, I didn't *give* a "mystical explanation." What I > > said was, "We don't know what's responsible; we > > don't know what's going on. We can't connect this to > > ordinary reality"--meaning reality that we know about. > > You last sentence is your mystical explanation, "youn can't > connect this to ordinary reality." Sounds mystical to me.
That sure isn't what I mean by the word "mystical." As I pointed out elsewhere, mystical experiences have very different characteristics, and the reporting circumstances are also very different. To call the premise that there is no known explanation an "explanation" of any kind seems to me to distort the meaning of the word. > The > > choice is between insisting on a stretched explanation > > and a willingness to entertain the possibility that there > > is no explanation consistent with what we know of reality. > > The explanations are not stretched in my mind and are > consistent with research on how our minds work and how our > memories work. They're very plausible if you aren't familiar with the nature of the reports and the reporting circumstances. Once you have become familiar with them, the explanations you propose have to be stretched excessively to account for the data. See my post "Abduction research--for Ruth (or not)" for some of these elements. As I said, Occam's razor works only in an adequate frame of reference. <snip> > > In many cases the accounts are far more detailed than > > anything found in popular culture, and these details > > are very similar from one account to another. > > How different would the details be if you believe you were > abducted by aliens and brought to a spaceship? Wow. They could be very different. Again, you really need to read the reports. The chances that so many people could come up with reports that were so similar on so many details without having consulted with each other is just about nil. And as Budd Hopkins notes, a significant number of these details had never been reported in the media or in print, up to the time he published his own books in the mid-'90s. > > With abduction reports, I'd be willing to consider an > > explanation along the lines of Jung's "collective > > unconscious," maybe even with a genetic component > > involving particular brain structures--in other words, > > a reality that we don't yet know about. > > This is a long way from where Mack was at for most of his > career. Yes, I know. I'm not a devotee of Mack's philosophy. <snip> > > Interesting that the child > > > sex abuse claims regarding daycare facilities came to a huge > > > peak, then died. > > > > Or perhaps are no longer being reported due to lack of > > receptivity. > > Oh I don't think so! Parents would go ballistic. It's not unusual for parents to *deny* their kids have been sexually abused even when there's excellent evidence for it. In this case, if the parents were aware of the current perception that most such accounts are bunk, they might well assume their kid was making stuff up. And the kid quickly gets the idea that such reports are not acceptable, so he or she just shuts up. <snip> > > And further, the experimenters assumed a priori that > > the abduction reports were false. It would be > > interesting to have researchers who are at the very > > least open-minded about the possibility that > > abduction experiences are in some sense real to attempt > > to replicate this experiment. > > > > So, interesting but by no means conclusive, as far as > > I'm concerned. > > Of course not conclusive. You collect studies and get a body > of research. You research how the mind works and do particular > studies on things that you are interested in. Believing the > reports of abduction were in error was their hypothesis. > Nothing wrong with that. Well, actually, that *wasn't* their hypothesis. Their hypothesis was that people who gave abduction reports would score higher on certain kinds of "memory distortion" tests. The assumption that the reports were false was not part of that.
