Pseudo Science

[austintorn@aol.com]

25. Ideological Immunity, or the Planck Problem

In day-to-day life, as in science, we all resist fundamental paradigm change. Social scientist Jay Stuart Snelson calls this resistance an ideological immune system: "educated, intelligent, and successful adults rarely change their most fundamental presuppositions" (1993, p. 54). According to Snelson, the more knowledge individuals have accumulated, and the more well-founded their theories have become (and remember, we all tend to look for and remember confirmatory evidence, not counterevidence), the greater the confidence in their ideologies. The consequence of this, however, is that we build up an "immunity" against new ideas that do not corroborate previous ones. Historians of science call this the Planck Problem, after physicist Max Planck, who made this observation on what must happen for innovation to occur in science: "An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out and that the growing generation is familiarized with the idea from the beginning" (1936, p. 97).

Psychologist David Perkins conducted an interesting correlational study in which he found a strong positive correlation between intelligence (measured by a standard IQ test) and the ability to give reasons for taking a point of view and defending that position; he also found a strong negative correlation between intelligence and the ability to consider other alternatives. That is, the higher the IQ, the greater the potential for ideological immunity. Ideological immunity is built into the scientific enterprise, where it functions as a filter against potentially overwhelming novelty. As historian of science I. B. Cohen explained, "New and revolutionary systems of science tend to be resisted rather than welcomed with open arms, because every successful scientist has a vested intellectual, social, and even financial interest in maintaining the status quo. If every revolutionary new idea were welcomed with open arms, utter chaos would be the result" (1985, p. 35).

In the end, history rewards those who are "right" (at least provisionally). Change does occur. In astronomy, the Ptolemaic geocentric universe was slowly displaced by Copernicus's heliocentric system. In geology, George Cuvier's catastrophism was gradually wedged out by the more soundly supported uniformitarianism of James Hutton and Charles Lyell. In biology, Darwin's evolution theory superseded creationist belief in the immutability of species. In Earth history, Alfred Wegener's idea of continental drift took nearly a half century to overcome the received dogma of fixed and stable continents. Ideological immunity can be overcome in science and in daily life, but it takes time and corroboration.

[austintorn@aol.com]

OBE’s and NDE’s

In an Out of Body experience, people report that they leave their bodies, even sometimes seeing them whole and laying there in their known surroundings.

Near Death Experiences can be like OBEs and/or with the added effects of what dying or near dying contributes, such as the seeing of non-human beings and/or tunnels and bright lights of otherworldly scenes.

OBEs and NBEs are accepted, via many credible reports, to be quite believable as a realm of human experience.


In life, one still takes a practical stand. Where there is nowhere to stand, one can fall for anything.

NDE tunnels of light and such can be explained by neurology, and OBE’s by a condition called sleep paralysis. They can also be induced, resulting in full blown episodes. Neither, then, are proof of a beyond, but of an altered brain state.

I realize that it is a hope to have an afterlife, but there are countless imaginary things wished for.

I had several OBE’s. In the first one, I noted that the scene looked as real as real could be, but I did nothing further than to float around the bedroom, full of amazement. I figured that the dream model of reality is the same one that is employed when we are awake.

During the second OBE, I rearranged the items on my end table, even knocking one item off. All still felt totally real to the touch and all that and I was sure that I would see the evidence of the end table results later when I fully awoke, but when I really awoke I saw that nothing had ben moved.

I also found that I could awake from dreams anytime by clenching my whole body, and so during the third OBE I luckily found myself in a kind of halfway state in which my dream-arms were seen to be fiddling with the end table stuff while I could also see my real arms still lying beside me unmoving. Another time, I was able to keep some dream music playing after I awoke.

I guess the moral is that sometimes a virtual dream reality cannot be told apart from real. I was so sure that I was out of my body, but one must also remember that memory and imagination often picture scenes from above (try it).

It is also the case that people of different religions see different religious figures during NDE’s, an indication that the phenomenon occurs within the mind, not without.

OBE’s are easily induced by drugs. The fact that there are receptor sites in the brain for such artificially produced chemicals means that there are naturally produced chemical in the brain that, under certain circumstances (the stress of an trauma or an accident, for example), can induce any or all of the experiences typically associated with an NDE or OBE. They are then nothing more than wild trips induced by the trauma of almost dying. Lack of oxygen also produces increased activity though disinhibition—mental modes that give rise to consciousness.

What about the experience of a tunnel in an NDE? Well, the visual cortex is on the back of the brain where information from the retina is processed. Lack of oxygen, plus drugs generated, can interfere with the normal rate of firing by nerve cells in this area. When this occurs ‘stripes’ of neuronal activity move across the visual cortex, which is interpreted by the brain as concentric rings or spirals. These spirals may be “seen” as a tunnel.

[AntonioLao]

By the 5-step processes of the scientific method, everything at first is pseudo until redo or undo. The 5 steps are (referencing page 5 of the text by the Infinity Project): (1) Observe some aspect of the universe. (2) Invent a tentative description (hypothesis) consistent with what you have observed. (3) Use the hypothesis to make predictions. (4) Test those predictions by experiments or further observations, and modify the hypothesis in light of your results. (5) Repeat Steps 3 and 4 until there are no discrepancies between theory and experiment and/or observation.

[austintorn@aol.com]

Alien Abductions

It seems that some may have such a wide open mind that emotions such as hope and despair can trump the evidence of the senses, especially in times like these, when the world seems to be spinning out of control, when there is a surge of belief in astrology, ESP, and other paranormal phenomena, spurred in part by a yearning to feel a sense of control. The mind looks a bit too hard for explanations, especially for those that let one be connected to a larger reality, a comfort bolstered by the thought of angels that are watching over one.

Yet none of this is ever so clear cut that one can see it straight out. Why is it all so invisible? Or, to say the same thing, “inter dimensional”? Because it is not really there.

Science, as it explains more and more each day, actually thus pushes people to seek even stranger sources of mystery and wonder, such as being abducted by aliens.

What makes abductees stand out is an inability to think scientifically. They are often asked if they understand that sleep paralysis, in which waking up during a dream causes the dream to leak into consciousness even while you remain immobilized, can produce the weird visions and hopelessness that abductees describe. They say that they do but that it doesn't apply to them.

It’s really more that they didn’t know what was happening and so they settled on abduction as the most plausible explanation, it being the simplest for such episodes as a pain in the groin being the stealing of sperm by shadowy figures of ETs. But are aliens really the most likely reason for bad dreams, nosebleeds and bruises?

As for other paranormal events, it’s not too far a step to see or hear what they are thinking intensely about through mental imagery.

[austintorn@aol.com]

Patternicity
December 2008

Michael Shermer

Noun. The tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise

Why do people see faces in nature, interpret window stains as human figures, hear voices in random sounds generated by electronic devices or find conspiracies in the daily news? A proximate cause is the priming effect, in which our brain and senses are prepared to interpret stimuli according to an expected model. UFOlogists see a face on Mars. Religionists see the Virgin Mary on the side of a building. Paranormalists hear dead people speaking to them through a radio receiver. Conspiracy theorists think 9/11 was an inside job by the Bush administration. Is there a deeper ultimate cause for why people believe such weird things? There is. I call it “patternicity,” or the tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise.

Traditionally, scientists have treated patternicity as an error in cognition. A type I error, or a false positive, is believing something is real when it is not (finding a nonexistent pattern). A type II error, or a false negative, is not believing something is real when it is (not recognizing a real pattern — call it “apatternicity”). In my 2000 book How We Believe, I argue that our brains are belief engines: evolved patternrecognition machines that connect the dots and create meaning out of the patterns that we think we see in nature. Sometimes A really is connected to B; sometimes it is not. When it is, we have learned something valuable about the environment from which we can make predictions that aid in survival and reproduction. We are the descendants of those most successful at finding patterns. This process is called association learning and it is fundamental to all animal behavior, from the humble worm C. elegans to H. sapiens.

Unfortunately, we did not evolve a Baloney Detection Network in the brain to distinguish between true and false patterns. We have no error-detection governor to modulate the pattern-recognition engine. (Thus, the need for science with its self-correcting mechanisms of replication and peer review.) But such erroneous cognition is not likely to remove us from the gene pool and would therefore not have been selected against by evolution.

In a September 2008 paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, “The Evolution of Superstitious and Superstition-like Behaviour,” Harvard University biologist Kevin R. Foster and University of Helsinki biologist Hanna Kokko test my theory through evolutionary modeling and demonstrate that whenever the cost of believing a false pattern is real is less than the cost of not believing a real pattern, natural selection will favor patternicity. They begin with the formula pb > c, where a belief may be held when the cost (c) of doing so is less than the probability (p) of the benefit (b). For example, believing that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator when it is only the wind doesn’t cost much, but believing that a dangerous predator is the wind may cost an animal its life.

The problem is that we are very poor at estimating such probabilities, so the cost of believing that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator when it is just the wind is relatively low compared with the opposite. Thus, there would have been a beneficial selection for believing that most patterns are real. Through a series of complex formulas that include additional stimuli (wind in the trees) and prior events (past experience with predators and wind) the authors conclude that “the inability of individuals — human or otherwise — to assign causal probabilities to all sets of events that occur around them will often force them to lump causal associations with non-causal ones. From here, the evolutionary rationale for superstition is clear: natural selection will favour strategies that make many incorrect causal associations in order to establish those that are essential for survival and reproduction.”

In support of a genetic selection model, Foster and Kokko note that “predators only avoid nonpoisonous snakes that mimic a poisonous species in areas where the poisonous species is common,” and that even such simple organisms as “Escherichia coli cells will swim towards physiologically inert methylated aspartate presumably owing to an adaptation to favour true aspartate.”

Such patternicities, then, mean that people believe weird things because of our evolved need to believe nonweird things.

[austintorn@aol.com]

From another thread… of a serious and very decent discussion…

Hi MIkal,

This relates to a person's capacity to become absorbed in his experience. For example, someone who easily becomes immersed in nature, art or a good book or film or a computer game, to the exclusion of the outside world, would be one who scored highly on the scale of 'Absorption.' Irwin expected OBEers to be higher on this measure and that is what he found. His OBEers seemed to be better than average at becoming involved in their experiences. —Mikal

Yes, this is what I read, too, which is why some OBE’ers are more prone to believe that the experience was actually real instead of a vision.

When one is half asleep but half awake, or even half dead or half alive, one is in a mixed state of both. We surely know we had a night dream after we wake up, even if it seemed real at the time, but when we totally know that we are awake, often just partly, then we surely believe all and would swear that the visions are of the real world.

Yet, as in my OBE music keeping on playing after I awoke or in the OBE visions while awake but in sleep paralysis, they are surely being manufactured by the imagination of the dream world, yet playing in the awake world, sometimes on top of it and sometimes even making a blend of the two worlds, as when I saw my dream arm diverging from my real arm…

This is not imagination...no imagination here!!!!

As you can see from my example, the awake and vivid dream imaginations of an OBE/NDE are indeed a powerful and often convincing occurrence. It got me the first time and I really relished the experience of floating around, even fiddling with some things (but later they were not moved).

It is really not likely that one left the body and went thousands of miles or even 5 feet.

Respectually, your dear friend, Austin

[melanie]

which is why some OBE’ers are more prone to believe that the experience was actually real instead of a vision.

Some entities are prone to believe also that the experience of them self is actually real instead of a vision.

Without realizing that all there is is VISION
There is nothing else other than this.

The objective world is the pseudo projection of an inner subjective reality.

The entity falls for this illusion as real, so while falling, please remember to let go of the air, then you will fly

There is no experience, there is only experiencing.

Vision is invisible, it can only appear as a reflective mirage / image.

Images R ''I''

[austintorn@aol.com]

How about that the raw and unseen objective world is the interpreted and painted face projection of an inner subjective reality back out whence the ‘waves’ originated, as can be measured.

In whatever way the implementation operates there can be no useful distinction of what makes a difference when there is no difference in the calling of the real, beyond such knowing as that colors represent different wave frequencies and so forth. The illusion is useful.

[austintorn@aol.com]

When I had my NDE did I get entangled with the gravitational wave??

I can only speak for OBE’s, but the ‘out of body’ part is similar for NDE’s. This could fool anyone. I was fooled the first time. I saw myself from above, clear as could be: ‘out of body’ and seeming to look down at my actual body.

In a subsequent episode I was lucky enough to note my real-looking ‘dream’ hand diverging from my real and unmoving hand. I was in sleep paralysis. This is when one is partly really awake, but cannot move.

When we have an normal imagination or a memory of a scene, we often see it from above. Think of someone and his girlfriend laying on a beach (a joke from another thread). You see them from above.

It’s not just a vision that comes in an OBE, but any sense. Once I kept a dream song playing for 10-15 seconds after I awoke. It was playing only on the mind-brain ‘radio’.

One may have an urge to reply that the OBE/NDE seemed really real, that it was surely not a vision of imagination, etc., but just think, first, about how it is always and only the mind-brain that puts a face on reality. I cannot stress enough that we only ever see the insides of our brain—the reality show—whether awake or asleep. Sure, objects seem to be ‘out there’, but they are actually projected, in the mind-brain ‘eye’, out back whence their light waves originated. There is no color, form, texture, etc. out there. There is not even light as we think of it, but ‘light’ made inside of our dark heads.

When one is ‘floating’ above one’s body, it is not that Gravity’s laws have been repealed, nor is one in another dimension, but just in the mind, as always.

Plus, in an NDE, a Hindu, say, does not see the same religious visions that a Christian does, further showing that all is of the individual’s mind-brain.

To boot, a full blown OBE experience can be induced chemically, but no one really wants to have an NDE induced .

In an NDE, one is in danger of death and the brain is certainly not in a normal state, perhaps even being drained of oxygen and nutrients. Seeing a light at the end of a tunnel is a result of how the visual cortex works in this state. We normally only see clearly only about the size of a deck of cards held at arm’s length (try looking just a little away and the clarity goes way down)—this is the center of the tunnel.

In summary, one sleeps, meditates or collapses has an OBE/NDE and then gets up again, all going rather back to normal.