While I agree that people can suffer from hallucinations and false
memory, this explanation must not and is not used to explain all
strange experiences. Society uses personal experience as a basis for
judging reality with reasonable success, including yourself Jed.
Otherwise you would have no opinions you would wish to share because
they all could be pure imagination. In addition, people trained to
make observations are accepted as valid observers especially If
several people see and describe the same event. Such testimony is
normally accepted by the law and is the basis for demanding
replication in science.
In the case of the UFO experience, the shared experience is
overwhelming. Like cold fusion, eventually the evidence overwhelms
any skeptical argument. The only rational skeptic remaining is the one
who is simply ignorant of the evidence. Of course, irrational
skeptics will always exist no matter what evidence is presented. These
people have no importance and are eventually ignored.
Ed
On Jul 30, 2009, at 1:34 PM, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Edmund Storms wrote:
If the experience is not real, it means that we cannot trust our
eyes, our memory or even radar to correctly determine reality.
I do not know about radar but there is abundant proof that we cannot
trues our eyes or memory to determine reality. This is why science
must be based on objective instrument readings and physical
evidence. People's senses are good for nothing when it comes to
establishing reality. This is especially true of untrained, amateur
observers. A naturalist looking at beetles in the woods may have a
reliable memory of the event, but anyone else's memory is bound to
mixed up with false memories, mistakes and mythology.
People today and in the past often have experiences that are
entirely imaginary. They often mistake dreams for reality, for
example. Memory is extremely malleable and not to be trusted at all.
This has been demonstrated in many simple tests. For example, in the
middle of a psychology lecture, an unannounced fake drama is
performed by actors. Say, a woman drops her purse, hits someone, and
runs out of the room shouting something. Then the professor asks the
students to write what they say. The accounts vary wildly.
It means that hundreds of thousands of people have been deceived by
very clever hoaxes . . .
There is no likelihood that abductions are hoaxes. There are
countless other experiences in the past, such as people who thought
they were visited by witches and succubuses and so on, which were
obviously false memories of physically impossible events. But the
people reporting these experiences believed them sincerely. Again,
psychological tests have shown that it is easy to implant a false
memory in most people. The techniques for doing this are settled and
have been repeated in many psychological studies.
. . . and we cannot believe anything a person claims to have
personally experienced without physical proof, and all that this
conclusion implies.
For traumatic and unlikely events, no one should ever believe
anything a person claims to have personally experienced, including
the person himself. That is never a reliable basis for belief.
Highly rational people who are used to studying human beliefs,
opinions and reactions know this to be true of themselves, even when
their brain is diseased and not functioning correctly.
My late mother was an expert in these issue (public opinion,
perception and psychology). In the last years of her life, her mind
was affected by Parkinson's and by the drugs she was taking for it.
One day she told my sister: "I just came back from a visit with
uncle Danny, upstairs." Uncle Danny had been dead for 20 years and
she was living in a one-floor retirement home, with no upstairs. My
sister went along with it, saying "oh really, and how is he?" A few
hours later after a nap she said, "What did I tell you before? Uncle
Danny? That's ridiculous; he's been dead for years. It must be that
damned medication, causing hallucinations," which it was. I told her
that if she were a shade more superstitious or spiritual she would
count that as a visit to heaven "upstairs," but knowing too much
about pharmacology ruined the experience for her.
Based on our knowledge of psychology, it is 99.9999% likely that all
reports of abductions, religious experiences, witchcraft, ESP,
hypnotic conditions and similar effects are a product of normal,
widely observed brain functions. I mean "normal" in sense that they
are widespread and can be induced in most people, and they are not
necessarily a sign of pathology (although they were in my mother's
case). The cause of these phenomena is not yet known (to my
knowledge) but the phonomena themselves been observed and carefully
documented by doctors and psychologists for 200 years. Delusions
such as abductions, non-existent rapes, witchcraft and the like are
not a bit surprising or unusual, and probably about as common as
appendicitis was before antibiotics.
If you think you have been abducted, that does not mean you are
crazy by any means, any more than it meant that young native
Americans who went on "vision quests" and saw impossible things were
crazy. The "vision quest" methods were optimized to trigger
delusions. Many other rituals, dances that go for hours and other
ceremonies are also known to induce delusions or extreme emotions.
Soldiers in WWII battles often reported extreme delusions that were
more vivid than reality, such as their dead friends walking in front
of them, or a woman with scull head trying to entice them into no-
man-land (both described by William Manchester in "Goodbye,
Darkness"). However, just because these experiences were vivid
certainly does not mean they were real!
- Jed
