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Believe It Or Not. What Have You Changed Your Mind About?

- Perception - The raw experience or apprehension of a possibly anomalous state of affairs, event, etc., and ...
- Conception - The witness's translation of the raw experience into memorizable / expressible form.
Meant to say @EnolaGaia that's a neat and important distinction and at the same time a large crack for stuff to drop through.
 
Excellent postings from gattino and EnolaGaia, I don't know what I can add.

I find myself starting many of my postings on the forum with 'When I was a kid..' or 'years ago..' or 'in the 60's' or 'in the 70's' or 'in the 80's' - I'm hard pressed to find anything Fortean that happened to me recently. Must confess I stopped taking the FT because there seemed nothing new under the Sun and the best bits (apart from IHTM) were the retrospectives and updates on the classical stories of rumminess I grew up with.
So either I'm older and wiser ('of any given set of explanations for an event occurring, the simplest one is most likely the correct one. Occam's razor does not however claim that the simplest answer is always correct'). Or I'm older and more jaded (the endless re-iteration and re-discovery of FACTS!! on the internet by people younger than my jokes). Or I'm simply older (senile). Is it just me or is the World less weird than it used to be ?
 
The world makes me very tired now. I can't imagine what it will be like if I get into old age.
 
At 60-and-a-half, and still having to work to the age of 66 to claim my pension, I'm not giving up. I'm still out in the world collecting weirdness.
I mean c'mon, a few days ago A TREE SPOKE TO ME!
 
At 60-and-a-half, and still having to work to the age of 66 to claim my pension, I'm not giving up. I'm still out in the world collecting weirdness.
I mean c'mon, a few days ago A TREE SPOKE TO ME!
A pear tree. Conference pears...
 
Meant to say @EnolaGaia that's a neat and important distinction and at the same time a large crack for stuff to drop through.

Thanks ...

My epistemological commitments fall within the radical constructivism realm, and I find it essential to distinguish between what the observer perceives versus how the observer frames / retains / describes an observation.

Anytime you observe something out of the ordinary you are 'thrown' (in the Heideggerian sense) into the position of each of the blind persons attempting to understand the elephant.

Furthermore, my professional activities have afforded me the opportunity to see how this distinction can lead to errors, omissions, misinterpretations, and even the ability to impose, modify, or guide interpretations in real time or retrospectively.

It's a wonder we're able to make as much coherent sense of our world as we do.
 
I find it essential to distinguish between what the observer perceives versus how the observer frames / retains / describes an observation.

The only way you know what they've perceived is by how they describe it, unless there are other witnesses with whose versions you can compare theirs.
 
That is hard for people to accept. Expressions such as 'I saw with my own eyes!' 'I heard EXACTLY what he said!' tell us this.
If everyone believed their senses were untrustworthy there'd be no Fortean experiences.

It'd go like this -
'Hey, last night I saw a ghost!'
'No you didn't. It was undoubtedly a trick of the light. Or you'd been drinking.'
'Oh yeah right, that'll be it.'

This exactly. I wonder how many Fortean experiences are simply dismissed by others or by the observer so that they are simply "lost". I've been amazed in the past by peoples' experiences coming to light in a throw away comment in a conversation, when I've had to say "whoah what did you say?". Extraordinary coincidences, events or circumstances simply dismissed because of lack of interest on their part or perhaps wanting to forget/believe or embarrassment at the prospect of being labelled a loony tunes.
 
This exactly. I wonder how many Fortean experiences are simply dismissed by others or by the observer so that they are simply "lost". I've been amazed in the past by peoples' experiences coming to light in a throw away comment in a conversation, when I've had to say "whoah what did you say?". Extraordinary coincidences, events or circumstances simply dismissed because of lack of interest on their part or perhaps wanting to forget/believe or embarrassment at the prospect of being labelled a loony tunes.

Absolutely. Many new posters arrive here with their own strange incident to relate, who've never dared discuss it before for those very reasons. We may be the first people ever to hear about it. Cherish'em, I say.

On a personal level, anyone who mentions even the vaguest weirdness in front of me must be prepared for a severe grilling. We had a thread called 'Stories you've heard at work' where I'd post them and encourage others to.
 
I have no evidence that anyone can eat 3 Shredded Wheat therefore it is impossible.

Do not take breakfast cereals lightly. You dice with them at your peril.

In a job on early starts years ago I knew I wouldn't get to eat all morning. I'd get up before 6 and stuff down as many cheapo Weetabix ripoffs as I could to get me through, fully prepared for the single bout of explosive diarrhoea exactly six hours later.

It was a marvel. Like clockwork.
 
I speak from dicing with Alpen each a.m. Described variously by nearest and dearest as sawdust, rabbit cage droppings et al. Real man me.

You can't rush that stuff though, it has to be chewed. Your soggy Aldi imitation Weetabix can be more or less poured down the throat. Comes out the same.
 
ETH: I've come full circle. I believed in extraterresrial visitations as a child - then in my twenties I became `sophisticated` and got more into parapsychological/multiverse Keelian/Valleean type explanations. Now however - for various reasons - I've reconsdered:.Sometimes things are just what they appear to be - and some UFO sightings may after all constitute nuts and bolds extraterrestrial craft of some sort.(In fact I think the use of `paralell universes` to account for unexplained stuff is becoming increasingly glib and lazy, just a modernised variant on `fairyland`). I should add that I would not include `abductions` in this - I feel that these have become a huge distraction and are most probably just psychological phenomena - not related to UFOs per se.

Bigfoot. I went through quite a big Hairy Man Ape phase some years ago - but I've tempered it a lot. The way the phenomena keeps cropping up all over the shop (Argentina lately, but there have also been aleged sightings in the UK!) and the way in which many descriptions include biologically improbable details such as `glowing red eyes` inclines me to believe that we are not dealing with a flesh and blood animal here - more something parapyschological at best. I do, however, still feel it possible that there may well be - or have been- a genuine relict hominid population in Central Asia/China/parts of Russia - perhaps a left over Neandethal tribe or the like.

Nessie. I've gone from being an interested and hopeful agnostic - to being an outright sceptic. This is based on wide reading from all angles. I do however, weirdly, still love all things `Loch Ness`.(And, yes, I really really would love to be proved wrong!)
 
Interesting thread. Personally, almost if not all of it. I now mostly believe in conformation bias, poor research, and the fallibility of eyewitnesses.
 
The only way you know what they've perceived is by how they describe it, unless there are other witnesses with whose versions you can compare theirs.

Agreed, but ...

The passage you quoted was something I expressed in relation to my own professional / theoretical orientation - i.e., the context within which I personally evaluate reports, and not something I think I can reliably establish.

From this perspective one of the first things I look for in scrubbing a story is the consistency between what the reporter says he / she experienced versus how he / she has described it. The point is to look for clues that might indicate some spin or presumptive categorization has been applied to the raw experience in generating the report.

A recent example would be a set of questions I asked (but to which I never got answers) framed to help me figure out why a modest-sized light observed on or a couple of feet above a road surface was explicitly categorized as a UFO rather than (e.g.) a specter, ghost, orb, earthlight, etc. ...
 
I did read them, well some of them. At Uni we each took a couple of "alternative" ideas and had to work up lectures to explain them and promote them. Then we all critiqued all the lectures. I got von Daniken and Leylines in the luck dip!
 
Hmmm.....for me I suppose it would be the alien/ufo enigma. Early on in my reading and thinking...from say 1969-1979...I thought it was probably ET here to ck us out but over the years based on much reading and talking to various people and some witnesses I have met, I have come to the conclusion that for the most part (I won't completely rule out the possibility that at sometime on earth we were visited) it isn't outer space aliens. As to what it could be.....well that's the question ain't it. ;)
 
I've gradually and sadly concluded, over two decades, that almost no Fortean phenomena are actually real, no ghosts (as independent non-corporeal entities), no lake monsters (for the most part, possible a big eel or two), no aliens, no yowies or bigfoot no 'ESP'. '.

Indeed a sad state of affairs, sir!

I would ask you - and those with a similar attitude -to try and distinguish between a mood - a mood of weariness - and an actual thought out conclusion.

So you've bean studying `Forteana` (hate the word!) for twenty years. That's quite a long time (although it's been a lot longer for me). So a feeling of `been there/done that` jadedness descends on you. This is natural, but is nothing more than a form of tiredness.

To use an analogy: a guy is heavily into music in his twenties and thirties. He goes to see new bands/concerts, whatever, reads the music press avidly, maybe has a band of his own...and so on. Then somewhere, let's say, in his mid-forties the jadedness creeps in. He starts saying that there's no good new music anymore...and then later on, by extension, he adds that even the stuff that he onced liked is a bit overrated and so on.

Of course this is nonsense: nothing has changed except him. He has become jaded. And being jaded is a subjective state of mind - not a worked out position. Don't be bluffed by it.

Then again you wouldn't be over-extrapolating would you? By this I mean drawing a general conclusion from a specific circumstance.

So I used to be entranced by the whole Loch Ness Monster thing. So I read up on it. After much doing so, and some thinking, and some internet exchages of views I concluded with reluctance that there is nothing to the story - it's just a mix of local folklore, misperceptions and the tourist trade.

Now if I were to over-extrapolate I would then attach this conclusion onto all other unexplained mysteries. So the Loch Ness Monster is a sham ergo so must UFOs be - because that's another Unexplained Mystery mentioned in the same breath, isn't it? But this just doesn't follow.

Another analogy. A guy fancies some woman. After some gathering of resolve,he finally approaches her. The woman makes it known in no uncertain terms that she finds him completely uninteresting - and laughs him off. The guy goes home and cries. He concludes that he is too plain/unexciting/old...whatever for any woman to ever take a fancy to him...and resolves to live like a monk henceforth. About a week later, however, he is casually looking at an attractive woman in a supermarket. Their eyes meet and the woman makes it known that the feeling is mutual....

Both events happened. Both are true. Should the guy think of himself as Quasimodo or Brad Pit? The fact is that both could be true - because the universe is not obliged to conform to the human mind's desire for consistency.

So don't over-extrapolate. You say you've decied that there's nothing in UFOs/ghosts/bigfoot,aliens and telepathy. That's quite a wide area you have sweepingly dismissed there. Have you really looked into them all? Because if you have then you must have an awful lot of time on your hands! I'm an aspergic with no family and very few friends - hence lots of time for study - and I haven't looked into all of these.

Take ghosts. I've maybe read four books in my whole lifetime on the topic of ghosts (It fails to excite me, somehow). So I don't feel arrogant enough to expound on the topic. It might all be BS or there might be a treasure trove of interesting cases in it all - I just don't know. So, unless you're the world's greatest scholar, I would suspect that there is some topic area in that list that you don't really know much about.You only think you do because....you're over-extrapolating.

Another thing to be wary of on the same lines is to think too much within the box of your own specialism.

There seems to be quite a lot of posters on here who have been boning up on psychology, or maybe studying it at Uni. Well done you, but we are getting lots of off the peg phrases like `cognitive dissonance` and `confirmation bias` and so on.

It is natural that a psychologist would see everything as being `all in the mind` - because their specialism dictates that. A chemist thinks everything is one big chemical reaction. An ecenomist thinks that everything is dictated by economic forces.A specialist in `the media` thinks that everything is a `media construct` (hence Fortean Times's very own `UFO correspondent`!)

So someone sees - let's say - a `ghost`. The psychologist will immediately focus on the witness as the subject (and potential patient). Why have they hallucianated thus? Of course the witness could have seen a chemical reaction. Or an economic force. Or a media construct. Or maybe even.... a ghost.

As Freud himself said: `Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar`.
 
There seems to be quite a lot of posters on here who have been boning up on psychology, or maybe studying it at Uni. Well done you, but we are getting lots of off the peg phrases like `cognitive dissonance` and `confirmation bias` and so on.

That might be me. I'm highly educated, sorry about that. Can't help using big words.
 
There seems to be quite a lot of posters on here who have been boning up on psychology, or maybe studying it at Uni. Well done you, but we are getting lots of off the peg phrases like `cognitive dissonance` and `confirmation bias` and so on.

I had no idea those phrases were anything specialised. Aren't they just the correct names for those things?
 
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